Development of a Real-Time Driver Health Detection System Using a Smart Steering Wheel

The number of vehicle accidents due to driver drowsiness continues to increase. Therefore, prompt and effective detection for driver health during driving is crucial to improvement of traffic safety. A set of real-time health detection system built into a smart steering wheel for the driver is proposed in the paper. The driver's health condition (drowsiness) is detected by a developed algorithm by monitoring the driver’s biological signals, including respiration, hand grip force, photoplethysmogram (PPG), and electrocardiogram (ECG). Meanwhile the driver's state of arrhythmia, as a common cardiac disease, can be diagnosed too. The test results indicate that the developed real-time driver health detection system can effectively monitor the state of vigilance and the cardiac state, i.e. arrhythmia, of the driver.

Street harassment and social control of young Muslim women in Brussels: destabilising the public/private binary

While some research has been undertaken in recent decades into sexual violence against women in public space, the same cannot be said about everyday, ‘mild’ forms of harassment. From field research in Brussels between 2013 and 2016 with young people, the majority of whom have a (Muslim) migration background, we can conclude that physical violence happens only rarely and that the fear experienced by these young women relates to a more general, ambient state of vigilance, which relates to feeling out of place; public space remains a predominantly masculine domain. One of the main findings of the study is that ‘mild’ forms of harassment are used as a strategy of social control by men hanging out and that young women apply defence tactics to protect themselves against the perceived dangers in the public domain. Street harassment is embedded in dual affective dynamics, which generates feelings of belonging among young men and feelings of threat in young women. Here street harassment emerges as a mode of social control which ‘keeps them in their place’.

Nerve injury drives a heightened state of vigilance and neuropathic sensitization in Drosophila

Injury can lead to devastating and often untreatable chronic pain. While acute pain perception (nociception) evolved more than 500 million years ago, virtually nothing is known about the molecular origin of chronic pain. Here we provide the first evidence that nerve injury leads to chronic neuropathic sensitization in insects. Mechanistically, peripheral nerve injury triggers a loss of central inhibition that drives escape circuit plasticity and neuropathic allodynia. At the molecular level, excitotoxic signaling within GABAergic (γ-aminobutyric acid) neurons required the acetylcholine receptor nAChRα1 and led to caspase-dependent death of GABAergic neurons. Conversely, disruption of GABA signaling was sufficient to trigger allodynia without injury. Last, we identified the conserved transcription factor twist as a critical downstream regulator driving GABAergic cell death and neuropathic allodynia. Together, we define how injury leads to allodynia in insects, and describe a primordial precursor to neuropathic pain may have been advantageous, protecting animals after serious injury.

Non-Intrusive Detection of Drowsy Driving Based on Eye Tracking Data

Drowsy driving is one of the leading causes of motor vehicle accidents in North America. This paper presents the use of eye tracking data as a non-intrusive measure of driver behavior for detection of drowsiness. Eye tracking data were acquired from 53 subjects in a simulated driving experiment, whereas the simultaneously recorded multichannel electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were used as the baseline. A random forest (RF) and a non-linear support vector machine (SVM) were employed for binary classification of the state of vigilance. Different lengths of eye tracking epoch were selected for feature extraction, and the performance of each classifier was investigated for every epoch length. Results revealed a high accuracy for the RF classifier in the range of 88.37% to 91.18% across all epoch lengths, outperforming the SVM with 77.12% to 82.62% accuracy. A feature analysis approach was presented and top eye tracking features for drowsiness detection were identified. Altogether, this study showed a high correspondence between the extracted eye tracking features and EEG as a physiological measure of vigilance and verified the potential of these features along with a proper classification technique, such as the RF, for non-intrusive long-term assessment of drowsiness in drivers. This research would ultimately lead to development of technologies for real-time assessment of the state of vigilance, providing early warning of fatigue and drowsiness in drivers.

Critical Information Literacy as a Path to Resist “Fake News”: Understanding Disinformation as the Root Problem

This paper proposes to discuss the problem of Fake News, its root problem disinformation and the path to resist it, critical information literacy. It initially distinguishes the concepts of fake news and disinformation through the views of authors as Allcott & Gentzkow (2017), Chomsky (2014), Serrano (2010) and Volkoff (1999). Our perspective considers that none of these phenomena are new or recent, and we do not consider the “combat” of fake news to be a simple task, considering that it involves issues related to the limits of freedom of speech and media censorship. Fake News are understood as intentionally and verifiably false articles created to manipulate people and disinformation as a bigger ensemble of techniques to manipulate public opinion for political gain with perverted (but not only false) information. One way to deal with these matters goes through a more complex process: the development of critical information literacy in the society as a whole. This concept is studied from the work of Downey (2016), Elmborg (2012), Freire (1967;1970) and others. Freire’s critical pedagogy helps the self-construction of subjects aware of their position and their social role, and it is a basic key for the formation of autonomous, critical and responsible individuals. Based on that, critical information literacy is a state of vigilance towards information that enables people to understand that information is socially constructed and to use it to produce new information in a creative and contextualized way. It concludes that critical information literacy is a consistent tool of resistance to Fake News as it allows people not only survive the informational flood but mainly to build a more ethical society in the use of information.

A Recurrent Increase of Synchronization in the EEG Continues from Waking throughout NREM and REM Sleep

Pointwise transinformation (PTI) provides a quantitative nonlinear approach to spatiotemporal synchronization patterns of the rhythms of coupled cortical oscillators. We applied PTI to the waking and sleep EEGs of 21 healthy sleepers; we calculated the mean levels and distances of synchronized episodes and estimated the dominant frequency shift from unsynchronized to synchronized EEG segments by spectral analysis. Recurrent EEG synchronization appeared and ceased abruptly in the anterior, central, and temporal derivations; in the posterior derivations it appeared more fluctuating. This temporal dynamics of synchronization remained stable throughout all states of vigilance, while the dominant frequencies of synchronized phases changed markedly. Mean synchronization had high frontal and occipital levels and low central and midtemporal levels. Thus, a fundamental coupling pattern with recurrent increases of synchronization in the EEG (“RISE”) seems to exist during the brain’s resting state. The generators of RISE could be coupled corticocortical neuronal assemblies which might be modulated by subcortical structures. RISE designates the recurrence of transiently synchronized cortical microstates that are independent of specific EEG waves, the spectral content of the EEG, and especially the current state of vigilance. Therefore, it might be suited for EEG analysis in clinical situations without stable vigilance.

The glycolytic metabolite methylglyoxal induces changes in vigilance by generating low-amplitude non-REM sleep

Methylglyoxal (MG), an essential by-product of glycolysis, is a highly reactive endogenous α-oxoaldehyde. Although high levels of MG are cytotoxic, physiological doses of MG were shown to reduce anxiety-related behavior through selective activation of γ-aminobutyric acid type A (GABAA) receptors. Because the latter play a major role in sleep induction, this study examined the potential of MG to regulate sleep. Specifically, we assessed how MG influences sleep-wake behavior in CD1 mice that received intracerebroventricular injections of either vehicle or 0.7 µmol MG at onset of darkness. We used electroencephalogram (EEG) and electromyogram (EMG) recordings to monitor changes in vigilance states, sleep architecture and the EEG spectrum, for 24 h after receipt of injections. Administration of MG rapidly induced non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREMS) and, concomitantly, decreased wakefulness and suppressed EEG delta power during NREMS. In addition, MG robustly enhanced the amount and number of episodes of an unclassified state of vigilance in which EMG, as well as EEG delta and theta power, were very low. MG did not affect overall rapid eye movement sleep (REMS) in a given 24-h period, but significantly reduced the power of theta activity during REMS. Our results provide the first evidence that MG can exert sleep-promoting properties by triggering low-amplitude NREMS.