Patent ID: 7663495

Claim:
A vigilance monitoring system for alerting a driver of a vehicle upon detecting a state of drowsiness by calculation of a deviation between a time derivative of force on a driver-vehicle interface and a moving average for the time derivative of force to thereby quantify the state of drowsiness of the driver independent of conditions inside and outside the vehicle, the system comprising: a force sensitive resistor connected to at least one driver-vehicle interface to monitor force by the driver on the driver-vehicle interface; an intelligent control in communication with the force sensitive resistor; a jerk profile modeled from the time derivative of force using the intelligent control; a general trend modeled from the moving average of the time derivative of force using the intelligent control; and a spikiness index defined by a degree of deviation between the jerk profile and the general trend to thereby quantify the state of drowsiness of the driver independent of conditions inside and outside of the vehicle.