Information Sharing to Improve Understanding of Proactive Steering Intervention for Elderly Drivers

Takuma Ito,Tatsuya Shino,Minoru Kamata

doi:10.1007/s13177-018-0153-y

Takuma Ito, Tatsuya Shino + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13177-018-0153-y

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Abstract

In this study, we focus on the effectiveness of information sharing as a practical method for improving elderly drivers’ understanding of a proactive steering intervention system that is triggered several seconds before a driver enters a dangerous situation. Because the situation of steering intervention is more complex than that of braking intervention, there are two characteristic topics to be investigated: prevention of information overload by provided visual contents, and reduction of subjective strangeness due to the steering intervention. At first, we implement four kinds of prototypes of visual content for the head-up display. After that, we investigate basic characteristics of various usages of the implemented prototype visual content using questionnaires. As a result of our experiments using a driving simulator, we confirm that information sharing using visual content is effective in improving elderly drivers’ understanding of benefits, trust, and reducing the feeling of strangeness of our system. In addition, from the comparisons between single and multiple uses of visual content, we propose methods to improve them further to prevent information overload.

Highlights

For reducing traffic accidents caused by elderly drivers, which is currently a major issue in Japan [1], more advanced safety technologies that assist such drivers are required [2–5]
Because our previous study [7] revealed that characteristics of individual elderly drivers affected their evaluations of proactive collision avoidance systems, we investigated each participant’s individual characteristics
To improve understanding of proactive steering intervention systems, we focused on information-sharing methods that provide drivers with internal data about control systems

Summary

Introduction

For reducing traffic accidents caused by elderly drivers, which is currently a major issue in Japan [1], more advanced safety technologies that assist such drivers are required [2–5] To this end, our research group [6] has been developing intelligence for automated vehicles. As discussed in our previous study [7], one of the characteristics of intelligent driving assistance systems is that a vehicle intervenes proactively and performs operations on behalf of the driver. To utilize such proactive collision avoidance systems, the investigation of driver acceptance is as important as technological development. As a result of previous experiments using a driving simulator, we confirmed basic tendencies regarding the acceptance of proactive collision avoidance

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