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

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.

Effectiveness of Information Sharing to Improve Elderly Drivers’ Acceptability for Proactive Intervention Systems

“…Written informed consent was obtained from all participants. In this study, we recruited the experimental participants from the participants in the previous experiments (8) (9) because some of them answered the negative evaluations for previous visual contents. As a result, 12 elderly drivers participated again in this study although remaining three participants could not participate.…”

“…The primary focus of our previous studies (8) (9) was to determine the types of visual contents that are necessary and the types that can be reduced. Thus, we prepared various types of elemental visual contents.…”

“…Basic investigation for improving understanding of proactive braking intervention system (8) Basic investigation for improving understanding of proactive steering intervention system (9) Phase 2…”

“…Timeframe of proactive braking intervention with information sharing using the previously developed (8) visual contents. Figure 11 shows a schematic of the timeframe of a proactive steering intervention with information sharing using previous visual contents, which are a simple mixture of the contents in the previous study (9) . Similar to the proactive braking intervention, 0.0 s indicates the time when the vehicle passed through the point just beside the parked car.…”

“…The stimulation of certain visual contents was so strong that the participants felt a disturbance. Timeframe of a proactive steering intervention with information sharing using previously developed (9) visual contents. Fig.…”