Privacy-preserving hierarchical federated learning with biosignals to detect drowsiness while driving

In response to the global safety concern of drowsiness during driving, the European Union enforces that new vehicles must integrate detection systems compliant with the general data protection regulation. To identify drowsiness patterns while preserving drivers’ data privacy, recent literature has combined Federated Learning (FL) with different biosignals, such as facial expressions, heart rate, electroencephalography (EEG), or electrooculography (EOG). However, existing solutions are unsuitable for drowsiness detection where heterogeneous stakeholders want to collaborate at different levels while guaranteeing data privacy. There is a lack of works evaluating the benefits of using Hierarchical FL (HFL) with EEG and EOG biosignals, and comparing HFL over traditional FL and Machine Learning (ML) approaches to detect drowsiness at the wheel while ensuring data confidentiality. Thus, this work proposes a flexible framework for drowsiness identification by using HFL, FL, and ML over EEG and EOG data. To validate the framework, this work defines a scenario of three transportation companies aiming to share data from their drivers without compromising their confidentiality, defining a two-level hierarchical structure. This study presents three incremental Use Cases (UCs) to assess detection performance: UC1) intra-company FL, yielding a 77.3% accuracy while ensuring the privacy of individual drivers’ data; UC2) inter-company FL, achieving 71.7% accuracy for known drivers and 67.1% for new subjects, ensuring data confidentiality between companies but not intra-organization; and UC3) HFL inter-company, which ensured comprehensive data privacy both within and between companies, with an accuracy of 71.9% for training subjects and 65.5% for new subjects.