Design and Realization of a Wearable Necklace for the Assessment of Driver Well-being through Heart Rate and Blood Oxygen Saturation Monitoring

This paper presents the design and implementation of a wearable sensor necklace for monitoring the well-being of drivers, focusing on heart rate (HR) and blood oxygen saturation (SpO(2)) measurements. The proposed necklace allows HR and SpO(2) monitoring into a compact and ergonomic design, enabling unobtrusive and continuous data collection during driving activities. The necklace's design prioritizes user comfort and ease of wearing to facilitate prolonged usage without interfering with driving tasks. Collected physiological data can be wirelessly transmitted to a mobile application for real-time analysis and visualization. The HR and SpO(2) data may provide information of the driver's physiological state and potential stress levels. Particular attention has been dedicated to the firmware development in order to extract HR and SpO(2) removing the motion artifacts that arise when the user moves the head. The design is validated by an experiment conducted in a simulated driving scenario, demonstrating the reliability of the wearable sensor necklace in capturing dynamic changes in HR and SpO(2) levels associated with driving-induced stress.