Fatigue of miners is caused by intensive workloads, long working hours, and shift-work schedules. It is one of the major factors increasing the risk of safety problems and work mistakes. Examining the detection of miner fatigue is important because it can potentially prevent work accidents and improve working efficiency in underground coal mines. Many previous studies have introduced feature-based machine-learning methods to estimate miner fatigue. This work proposes a method that uses electroencephalogram (EEG) signals to generate topographic maps containing frequency and spatial information. It utilizes a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify the normal state, critical state, and fatigue state of miners. The topographic maps are generated from the EEG signals and contrasted using power spectral density (PSD) and relative power spectral density (RPSD). These two feature extraction methods were applied to feature recognition and four representative deep-learning methods. The results showthat RPSD achieves better performance than PSD in classification accuracy with all deep-learning methods. The CNN achieved superior results to the other deep-learning methods, with an accuracy of 94.5%, precision of 97.0%, sensitivity of 94.8%, and F1 score of 96.3%. Our results also show that the RPSD-CNN method outperforms the current state of the art. Thus, this method might be a useful and effective miner fatigue detection tool for coal companies in the near future.
Keywords: EEG; convolutional neural network (CNN); deep learning; fatigue detection; miners; the relative power spectral density (RPSD).