Analysis on Biosignal Characteristics to Evaluate Road Rage of Younger Drivers: A Driving Simulator Study*

This paper focused on biosignal characteristics to analyze road rage of young drivers in a driving simulator experiment. A total of 12 subjects were enrolled during the experimental study. At first, an unfair incident video is utilized to induce the anger emotion of drivers, and then the anger state is recorded based on the Likert anger scale; meanwhile, a physiological recorder is used to acquire electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals of the subjects. In biosignal processing stage, four typical rhythm bands of α,β,δ, and θ are extracted from the original EEG using a digital filter and wavelet packet decomposition, and power spectrums of the four typical rhythm bands are obtained with a fast Fourier transform analysis. In addition, the average heart rate and R-R standard deviation are calculated through a temporal domain analysis from the original ECG signals. Furthermore, the relationships are analyzed between the sex calculated indicators and four angry levels. It indicates that there is a mainly statistical effect of the angry state for typical rhythm bands of α,β,δ, average heart rate and R-R standard deviation, indicating that these features were significantly different for the normal state, light anger, moderate anger, and heavy anger. The research results provide a theoretical basis and data support for driving emotion detection and aggressive driving behavior analyzing.