Electrodermal Response and Automation Trust during Simulated Self-Driving Car Use

Abstract

The integration of self-driving vehicles may expose individuals with health concerns to undue amounts of stress. Psychophysiological indicators of stress were used to determine changes in tonic and phasic stress levels brought about by a high-fidelity autonomous vehicle simulation. Twenty-eight participants completed one manual driving task and two automated driving tasks. Participants reported their subjective level of trust in the automated systems using the Automation Trust Survey. Psychophysiological stress was indexed using skin conductance and trapezius muscle tension. Results indicate that users show more signs of physiological stress when the vehicle drives autonomously than when the users is in control. Results also indicate that users show an additional increase in stress when the user reports low trust in the autonomous vehicle. These findings suggest that health-care professionals and manufactures should be aware of additional stress associated with self-driving technology.

A Review of Psychophysiological Measures to Assess Cognitive States in Real-World Driving

“…A recent study utilized feature extraction and discrimination processing techniques to classify EDA data into low, medium, vs. high stress levels with about 82% recognition rate (Liu and Du, 2018 ). Another recent study found higher SCLs when participants drove a simulated vehicle in autonomous mode compared to manual mode (Morris et al, 2017 ). Higher skin conductance levels could be indicative of lower levels of trust in the autonomous mode than manual mode.…”

“…Researchers have studied muscular activations under controlled conditions to index mental processes (Lundberg et al, 1994 ; Wijsman et al, 2013 ; Luijcks et al, 2014 ). Applied driving research has successfully assessed psychological processes by assessing EMG (Healey et al, 1999 ; Fu et al, 2016 ; cf., Morris et al, 2017 ; Ma et al, 2018 ).…”

“…Stress and fatigue have been studied by recording electrical activity from relevant muscles. For instance, variations in the trapezius muscle (a major back muscle that extends from the neck to shoulder blades and lower spine) and deltoid (triangular muscle located on uppermost part of an arm and the top of shoulder) are influenced by mental stress (Wikström, 1993 ; Balasubramanian and Adalarasu, 2007 ; Hirao et al, 2007 ; Wijsman et al, 2013 ; Luijcks et al, 2014 ; cf., Morris et al, 2017 ). A recent study (Lee et al, 2017a ) recorded trapezius muscle activity to detect stress in a driving simulator under relaxed and stressed conditions.…”

Using Smartbands, Pupillometry and Body Motion to Detect Discomfort in Automated Driving

“…Body motion during driving has mainly been investigated with regard to head movements for predicting driver intentions (Pech et al, 2014 ), hand movements for estimating driver distraction (Tran and Trivedi, 2009 ), trapezius muscle tension as an indicator for stress (Morris et al, 2017 ), or facial features for monitoring driver states (Baker et al, 2004 ). Moreover, the whole 3D driver posture is considered potentially useful for extracting information related to intentions, affective states, and distraction (Tran and Trivedi, 2010 ).…”

Effects of an Unexpected and Expected Event on Older Adults’ Autonomic Arousal and Eye Fixations During Autonomous Driving

“…This increase persisted up to 30 s, yet there was no significant difference found during the expected stop journey. Driving studies have indicated that high skin conductance levels are modulated by various phenomena such as increased workload (e.g., Mehler et al, 2012 ), stress (e.g., Affanni et al, 2018 ), anxiety ( Barnard and Chapman, 2018 ), and lower trust in automation ( Morris et al, 2017 ; see Lohani et al, 2019 for a review). It is therefore difficult to infer specifically why skin conductance levels rose, other than reflecting an overall increase in sympathetic arousal.…”