Development of Heart Rate Monitoring System to Estimate Driver's Mental Workload Level

Driver's mental workload is affecting the driver's performance while driving. A high mental workload task proved that the driver's performance level decrease. The decreasing of driver's performance lead to driver carelessness that causes a road accident. Thus, the way to estimate and monitor the driver's mental workload has to be developed. The purpose of this project is to monitor the driver's mental workload and give a prompt warning to the drivers whether they are safe or not to drive, thus enhancing road safety. This project started by obtaining information about the driver's mental workload through a driver's heart rate. For early stage, this project conducted by using an electronic device for education, which is Arduino Kit and heart rate sensor. The heart rate sensor will detect the heart beat through the fingertips as an input. Then the input will be sent to Arduino, and it will monitor the reading of heart beat in beat per minutes (BPM) through a connected screen monitor. An experiment conducted in two conditions which are at rest condition and during Mathematical Arithmetic Task to estimate the driver's mental workload. By using the developed sensor system, the threshold value of mental workload was collected. The buzzer will produce a sound if the reading heart rate value is exceeding the maximum threshold heart rate reading for the safe driving condition.