Assessment of Infrared Thermography of Thyroid Gland for Development of a New Non-invasive Sleep Detection System

One of the causes of the human death is the road crashes due to the driver drowsiness or falling asleep. Thermography is one of new techniques for non-invasive automatic detection of driver drowsiness, which could help to prevent sleep-related road accidents. In this research, we aimed to record the temperature of the thyroid gland when a person is awake, drowsy, or starts to fall asleep.

For capturing the neck’s thermogram, a human thermal video recording was designed. The imaging procedure consisted of the attended cases’ preparation, capturing static thermal video of the neck, and analyz-ing the resultant thermal videos with a particular image-processing algorithm for extracting the temperature data. The image-processing algorithm consisted of image segmentation, noise reduction, and specification of the region of interest for recording the thyroid temperature.

In the wakefulness, a region of the skin, which is in the front of thyroid gland, had an average temperature of 34.5 ± 0.3C. A change from being awake to being drowsy and falling asleep reduced the average temperature of the neck area to 33.5 ± 0.2 C and 32.5 ± 0.1C, respectively.

A change from being awake to being drowsy and falling asleep reduces the temperature of the thyroid gland and the neck skin which is located in front of the thyroid gland. By knowing such temperature reduction, a non-invasive system for detection of the person drowsiness or falling asleep can be developed by means of the infrared thermography (IRT).