Sharing a driver’s context with a caller via continuous audio cues to increase awareness about driver state.

Abstract

In an experiment using a driving simulator we investigated whether sharing information of a driver's context with a remote caller via continuous audio cues can make callers more aware of the driving situation. Increased awareness could potentially help in making the conversation less distracting. Prior research has shown that although sharing context using video can create such beneficial effects, it also has some practical disadvantages. It is an open question whether other modalities might also provide sufficient context for a caller. In particular, the effects of sharing audio, a cheaper, more salient, and perhaps more practical alternative than video, are not well understood. We investigated sharing context using direct cues in the form of realistic driving sounds (e.g., car honks, sirens) and indirect cues in the form of elevated heartbeats. Sound sharing affected the caller's perception of the driver's busyness. However, this had at most a modest effect on conversation and driving performance. An implication of these results is that although sharing sounds can increase a caller's awareness of changes in the driver's busyness, they need more training or information on how to leverage such context information to reduce disruption to driving. Limitations and implications are discussed.

Priming Drivers before Handover in Semi-Autonomous Cars

“…Our results confirm the classical result in driver distraction research (e.g., [1,9,10,28,29,33,45,46,51]) that secondary tasks distract from looking at the road (RQ1, Figure 4) and result in longer response times to incidents (RQ3, Figure 7). Our results also suggest that pre-alerts can mitigate some of these problems.…”

“…[29,44]), as in our increasing pulse pre-alert. However, there is still a wide design space to explore regarding exact choices.…”

“…For example, park assistant alerts decrease the inter-stimulus interval between beeps when a car gets close to another object to suggest urgency to stop. In other studies, increasing pulses (e.g., heartbeats) have also been used to successfully convey urgency [29].…”

A comparison of artificial driving sounds for automated vehicles

“…It has been shown that auditory icons are an effective solution when designing sounds in order to convey perceived meaning and control a driver's actions [20]. In the context of making a phone call, Janssen et al [15] used auditory icons such as real driving sounds and heart beats as direct and indirect cues to convey a drivers busyness to a caller. Their study showed the provision of auditory cues to be more effective than when no audio cues were presented.…”

Integrating knowledge of multitasking and interruptions across different perspectives and research methods

“…These range from preventing switching (e.g., Mark et al, 2012), to providing information about the context in which an interruption or distraction takes place (e.g., Grandhi, Schuler, & Jones, 2011;Janssen, Iqbal, & Ju, 2014), to providing training so that people better manage interruptions (e.g., Relihan, O'Brien, O'Hara, & Silke, 2010), to designing systems to mediate the interaction between users and other tasks demanding their attention (e.g., Arroyo & Selker, 2011;Iqbal & Bailey, 2010). Of course, despite the potential for the use of theory in practical settings, the link between theory and practice might not always be immediately obvious.…”