The role of expert evaluation for microsleep detection

Recently, it has been shown by overnight driving simulation studies that microsleep density is the only known sleepiness indicator which rapidly increases within a few seconds immediately before sleepiness related crashes. This indicator is based solely on EEG and EOG and subsequent adaptive pattern recognition. Accurate microsleep recognition is very important for the performance of this sleepiness indicator. The question is whether expensive evaluations of microsleep events by a) experts are necessary or b) non-experts provide sufficient evaluations. Based on 11,114 microsleep events in case a) and 12,787 in case b) recognition accuracies were investigated utilizing (i) artificial neural networks and (ii) support-vector machines. Cross validated classification accuracies ranged between 92.2 % for (i,b) and 99.3 % for (ii, a). It is concluded that expert evaluations are very important to provide independent information for detecting microsleep.