On-demand driver vigilance enhancement without explicit drowsiness detection-Further analysis of the pilot study results.

Objective: A new active safety concept that engages the driver's psychosensory pain-processing mechanism to automatically trigger vigilance enhancement on-demand was proposed in Chang (2012). This concept is based on the hypothesis that a human's pain threshold will decline as he or she becomes drowsy, consequently triggering the vigilance enhancer. The objective of this pilot study was to develop methods to test this hypothesis, the results of which could lead to further refinement of the hypothesis and methods, with the ultimate goal of developing new active safety concepts that exploit the driver's endogenous psychosensory pain-processing mechanisms.