Investigating the Relationship Between a Driver’s Psychological Feelings and Biosensor Data

Recent studies show that emotional changes can influence driving behavior. For example, positive valence could enable better takeover performance in regaining vehicle control. On the other hand, a state of anger has been shown to degrade driver situational awareness and performance compared to a neutral state. These emotional states may result from different factors like a vehicle’s internal or external environment. The roadside environment is one of the external factors which might influence driver behavior and performance. Hence, it is necessary to understand how emotional conditions affect driving actions to design safer road environments. However, research involving the use of emotions can be challenging due to methodological issues associated with measuring emotions. Different methods can be used to measure emotion both subjectively and objectively. These could include the use of reliable sources for assessing evoked emotions, since subjective emotional experiences are the essence of a feeling. An objective manifestation of emotion can be captured as a representation of our inner experience. Also, the objective manifestation of emotion is the representation of our inner experience. In this study, we conducted an eye-integrated human-in- the- loop (HTIL) simulation experiment to analyze the driver’s emotional state by comparing both subjective and objective data to find the relation between drivers’ physiologic feelings (i.e., Kansei Engineering method) and biosensor data (i.e., facial expression and eye movement).