Sensitivity of Electrodermal Activity Features for Driver Arousal Measurement in Cognitive Load: The Application in Automated Driving Systems

Driver’s under-arousal occurred in automated driving systems (ADS) impairs takeover safety. This study aims to determine electrodermal activity (EDA) features’ importance for driver’s arousal quantification. A car-following simulator study was conducted with participants concurrently executing four levels of cognitive tasks, triggering four levels of arousal. Participants’ skin conductance (SC) data were collected and decomposed into tonic (skin conductance level, SCL) and phasic (skin conductance response, SCR) components. Seventeen features extracted from SC, SCL and SCR were compared. As a result, SCR-relevant features showed higher significance and larger effect size than SC and SCL features in response to cognitive load, which suggests the phasic component dominates changes in EDA under varying cognitive load. Moreover, the SCR rate TTP.nSCRs, identified by $0.03 ~\mu \text{S}$ thresholds, attained the largest effect size among all features for driver’s arousal measurement. A varying time windows (TW) analysis showed that TTP.nSCRs was the most suggested arousal metric when TW was over 20 s, whereas the sum of SCRs amplitudes TTP.AmpSum was preferred when TW was less than 20 s. For driver’s arousal quantification with multi-features, the top five suggested features were TTP.nSCRs, SC_Rate5, CDA.SCR (or CDA.ISCR), CDA.AmpSum, and TTP.AmpSum. Although male drivers showed higher values of EDA features than female drivers, the sensitivity of the proposed EDA features stands across gender and individuals. This study promotes an improved understanding of EDA changes in human cognitive process. The sensitive EDA features proposed could be used from uni- or multi-modalities in driver state management and takeover-safety prediction for ADS.