DrivingStyles: Assessing the correlation of driving behavior with heart rate changes

Abstract

Driving safety is of utmost importance in our society. The number of fatalities due to car accidents is still very high, and reducing this trend requires as much attention as possible. There are situations where the emotional conditions of drivers vary due to either reasons beyond their control, or because they decide to change their driving style. Hence, we consider that such frequent situations deserve more scrutiny. In this paper we designed an Android application able to monitor in real-time both physiological data from the driver and diagnostic data from the vehicle to study their correlation. More specifically, we study the connection between driving aggressiveness and heart rate. The vehicle diagnostic data is obtained using an OBD-II connector. Among the various non-invasive biomedical sensors available nowadays, in this work we focus on heart rate sensors, either packaged in belts or in smart watches.