Towards In-Vehicle Non-Contact Estimation of EDA-Based Arousal with LiDAR

Driver monitoring systems are increasingly relying on physiological signals to assess cognitive and emotional states for improved safety and user experience. Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a particularly informative biomarker of arousal but is conventionally measured with skin-contact electrodes, limiting its applicability in vehicles. This work explores the feasibility of non-contact EDA estimation using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) as a novel sensing modality. In a controlled laboratory setup, LiDAR reflection intensity from the forehead was recorded simultaneously with conventional finger-based EDA. Both classification and regression tasks were performed as follows: feature-based machine learning models (e.g., Random Forest and Extra Trees) and sequence-based deep learning models (e.g., CNN, LSTM, and TCN) were evaluated. Results demonstrate that LiDAR signals capture arousal-related changes, with the best regression model (Temporal Convolutional Network) achieving a mean absolute error of 14.6 on the normalized arousal factor scale (–50 to +50) and a correlation of r = 0.85 with ground-truth EDA. While random split validations yielded high accuracy, performance under leave-one-subject-out evaluation highlighted challenges in cross-subject generalization. The algorithms themselves were not the primary research focus but served to establish feasibility of the approach. These findings provide the first proof-of-concept that LiDAR can remotely estimate EDA-based arousal without direct skin contact, addressing a central limitation of current driver monitoring systems. Future research should focus on larger datasets, multimodal integration, and real-world driving validation to advance LiDAR towards practical in-vehicle deployment.