Enhancing Road Safety Through Fitness-to-Drive Metrics: The NextPerception Project on Driver Behavior Analysis and Gamification

Driving involves numerous factors demanding a driver's attention. To enhance road safety, there has been a significant increase in the development and implementation of vehicle sensors. These sensors, in conjunction with mobile applications, can assess a driver's emotional state and focus, providing feedback to enhance their attention. This paper explores the monitoring of driver behavior, emphasizing the effects of distractions and emotions on driving performance. Stemming from the European initiative, NextPerception, this research focuses on advancing perception sensors and refining distributed intelligence models in various domains, including automotive. The initiative aims to develop a range of sensors, from obstacle detection tools to those monitoring a driver's eye movements and vital signs. A key goal is to define a "fitness-to-drive" metric, representing the driver's attentiveness level. The project also seeks to use gamification to emphasize the importance of this metric, increasing drivers' awareness of their driving skills. The ultimate aim is to create a system that determines fitness-to-drive based on distractions and emotions, integrating this into a prototype simulating sensor data, and introducing a web-based application to display this data for a community of drivers.