A Driving Simulation Study Examining Destination Entry with iOS 5 Google Maps and a Garmin Portable GPS System

Abstract

A simulation study compared 23 young adult drivers' task completion time, mean glance time, number of glances, and percentage of long glances while performing a navigation entry task with a Garmin portable GPS system and a mobile navigation application (iOS 5 Google Maps) on an iPod Touch. We compared participants' performance on these tasks using the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) eye-glance acceptance criteria. We found that, irrespective of the device used, no participant was able to complete the task within the recommended total time window of 12 seconds. When entering a destination into the iOS interface, only 73.9% of the drivers meet the NHTSA criteria for long duration glances. With the Garmin system, 91.3% of the participants meet this criterion. All participants were able to maintain adequate mean off road glance durations. Finally, we compared the NHTSA recommended method of assessing all off road glances to more traditional methods of assessing glances only to the task interface. Differences between the two methods are discussed.

Multi-modal assessment of on-road demand of voice and manual phone calling and voice navigation entry across two embedded vehicle systems

“…Workload is best defined by the person doing the task and may involve mental effort , the amount of attention required, physical effort, time pressure, distraction, or frustration associated with trying to do the task while continuing to drive safely’. Previous work (Beckers et al 2014 ; Dopart et al 2013 ) using this approach produced ratings across user interface tasks that were consistent with relative rankings obtained concurrently using the NASA-Task Load Index (Hart 2006 ; Hart and Staveland 1988 ), one of the most widely used subjective workload assessment scales. In this regard, Hendy, Hamilton, and Landry ( 1993 ) provide a useful consideration of the sensitivity of simple univariate workload scales relative to multifactor scales when the goal is to obtain an overall workload rating.…”

“…While the values obtained with each method differ and are worthy of consideration (e.g. Dopart et al 2013 ; Reimer et al 2013 ), using one or the other did not appreciably change the relative pattern of results in this data set comparing systems and modalities. Given the potential relevance to ongoing guideline development, the metrics recommended by NHTSA are presented.…”

Critical Analysis on the NHTSA Acceptance Criteria for In-Vehicle Electronic Devices

“…The 85 th percentile of the mean OTs for the NHTSA scenario was exactly 2.0 seconds. However, when looking at our test results, the results of [4], and the Wierwille's visual sampling model for real driving [17], this acceptance criteria does not make much sense. The average in-car glance durations for the test tasks were all below 1.0 seconds and in line with Wierwille's model.…”

“…These could be due to personal factors such as uncertainty toleration [4] or the skill level of the driver [18]. The usage of the often-used 85 th percentile in the acceptance criteria shows a pretty nice sense of realism about the data.…”

Effects of age and smartphone experience on driver behavior during address entry

“…Driver interactions with smartphones are generally complex, placing considerable attention on the safety concerns of use while driving. Research has shown that different types of devices have differential draws on driver attention [7,2]. Other work investigating the modality of interactions suggests that voice interfaces may be less demanding than visual-manual equivalents [3,8].…”