Further development of a commercial driving simulation for research in occupational medicine.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to refine a commercial car driving simulation for occupational research. As the effects of ethanol on driving behavior are well established, we choose alcohol as a test compound to investigate the performance of subjects during simulation.

Materials And Methods: We programmed a night driving scenario consisting of monotonous highway and a rural road on a Foerst F10-P driving simulator.

Acoustic sleepiness detection: framework and validation of a speech-adapted pattern recognition approach.

This article describes a general framework for detecting sleepiness states on the basis of prosody, articulation, and speech-quality-related speech characteristics. The advantages of this automatic real-time approach are that obtaining speech data is nonobstrusive and is free from sensor application and calibration efforts. Different types of acoustic features derived from speech, speaker, and emotion recognition were employed (frame-level-based speech features).