Safe adaptation in an automotive vehicle: the driver advocate

摘要

We are investigating the issues surrounding information presentation to a vehicle operator, to enhance their environmental awareness and provide better on-task performance, despite the presence of numerous distractions. Two trends have caused us to focus on this area. First, the increased availability of inexpensive sensors such as GPS, radar and video that can provide additional services to a driver, such as navigation assistance, automatic cruise control, and collision warnings. Second, drivers are tending to spend more time in their vehicle, and wish to make productive use of this time, either in office productivity tasks, or maintaining external relationships (e.g., using a cellular phone to participate in meetings or engage in social conversations). As the number and complexity of in-vehicle (or driver portable, e.g., bringing a portable CD player into the vehicle) services increases, the potential for Fatal Distraction also increases. While we have chosen this domain for the wide variety of experiments in human factors, interface design, and service architectures it affords, our current particular focus of attention is on an intelligent system that will monitor driver attention, and aid in appropriate information presentation to reduce distraction, and improve driver situation awareness.