Studying Personalized Just-in-time Auditory Breathing Guides and Potential Safety Implications during Simulated Driving

Abstract

Driving can occupy a considerable part of our daily lives and is often associated with high levels of stress. Motivated by the effectiveness of controlled breathing, this work studies the potential use of breathing interventions while driving to help manage stress. In particular, we implemented and evaluated a closed-loop system that monitored the breathing rate of drivers in real-time and delivered either a conscious or an unconscious personalized acoustic breathing guide whenever needed. In a study with 24 participants, we observed that conscious interventions more effectively reduced the breathing rate but also increased the number of driving mistakes. We observed that prior driving experience as well as personality are significantly associated with the effect of the interventions, which highlights the importance of considering user profiles for in-car stress management interventions. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Auditory feedback; Empirical studies in HCI ; • Applied computing → Consumer health.

AmbientBreath

“…The appropriate passive capture of physiology provides useful information about the timing and severity of a driver's stress without interfering with the driving task [30,32]. The capability of continuous collection of driver's states enables the development of in-car driver assistant applications for counteracting stress and for enhancing speedy recovery from its impaired mental status [6,7,53,75]. For example, Van Der Zwaag et al [67] evaluated the effect of negative and positive music on improving a driver's mood and physiology.…”

“…Therefore, a secondary task of breathing practices in a car may cause unwanted driving mistakes by adding extra workload beyond the cognitive capacity of a driver. Zepf et al [75] collected data showing higher accident rates (in a car simulator) when trying to engage a driver consciously with an auditory breathing guide in their study. In their work, the conscious auditory intervention showed both the effects of slowing down breathing rate as well as of increasing driving mistakes during urban driving conditions with medium traffic.…”

“…Zepf et al [75] adopted into the car simulator an ambient breathing intervention from Ghandeharioun and Picard [27], which utilized subtle modulatory changes of ambient background white noise to match a desired goal breathing rate. While the technique worked in an office deployment study, in the car (under much higher stress conditions), it did not usually succeed in helping the drivers lower their breathing rates.…”

“…In this work, we want to present a multi-sensory in-car interface reflecting a breathing intervention designed to help the drivers with calm breathing. The design of the in-car HMI is based on participative involvement of the users by first considering the results and feedback of drivers from a previous work [75]. We further involve users in design through their physiological feedback as a trigger of the intervention and by finally conducting a user study for the assessment of the efficacy of the intervention.…”

“…The MBR was the breathing rate of a driver during the rest period in the simulator without any task. We intended to locate this GBR value between the breathing rate under non-demanding activity and the normal driving task based on the given values from the former studies [7,75]. Zepf et al [75] showed the normalized breathing rate of 1.3 under the simulated driving task without a breathing guide.…”