Eye tracking use in researching driver distraction: A scientometric and qualitative literature review approach

Many factors affect road safety, but research constantly shows that drivers are the major cause of critical situations that could potentially lead to a traffic accident in road traffic. Visual information is a crucial part of input information into the driving process; therefore, distractions of overt visual attention can potentially have a large impact on driving safety. Modern eye tracking technology enables researchers to gain precise insight into the direction and movement of a driver’s gaze during various distractions. As this is an evolving and currently very relevant field of road safety research, the present paper sets out to analyse the current state of the research field and the most relevant publications that use eye tracking for research of distractions to a driver’s visual attention. With the use of scientometrics and a qualitative review of the 139 identified publications that fit the inclusion criteria, the results revealed a currently expanding research field. The narrow research field is interdisciplinary in its core, as evidenced by the dispersion of publication sources and research variables. The main research gaps identified were performing research in real conditions, including a wider array of distractions, a larger number of participants, and increasing interdisciplinarity of the field with more author cooperation outside of their primary co-authorship networks

Multimodal Analysis of Pilot’s Fatigue During a Multi-Phase Flight Mission

One troubling threat to successful flight missions is attributed to fatigue induced and errors. Therefore, discovering effective methods to assess fatigue has been a major topic discussed by professional pilots and aviation experts. Fatigue is a major human factor related issue in aviation and currently subject to increased discussion by aviation administrations and professional pilots. Therefore, effective assessment of fatigue will provide opportunities to reduce the risk of fatigue-induced errors. Currently available subjective measures that assess fatigue can be somewhat affected by external and internal factors, that might cause biased judgment. Therefore, Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT), which provides objective measures, can be a viable approach to measure fatigue. In addition, eye movement analysis might augment the fatigue assessment, because eye movement analysis is an unobtrusive approach that does not require direct contact with the participant and can be measured for a long duration. However, it is unknown how eye movement characteristics are correlated with fatigue. In this research, a multi-modal fatigue measurement framework was developed by combining the PVT analysis with eye movement analysis. In detail, PVT measures (i.e., reaction time, lapses & false starts) and eye movement characteristics (i.e., eye fixation duration, pupil size, number of eye fixations, gaze entropy) were measured to determine pilots’ fatigue level under different flight conditions. The results show that significant correlations exist among the eye movement characteristics and the PVTs measures. The proposed multi-modal approach show promise on evaluating pilot fatigue in near real time, which in turn might enable timely recovery interventions