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Impact of ITS on driver’s safety: positive or negative ?
Annie Pauzie
To cite this version:
Annie Pauzie. Impact of ITS on driver’s safety: positive or negative ?. Fit to Drive 8th International
Traffic Expert Congress, May 2014, VARSOVIE, Poland. 3 p. �hal-01810340�
Fit to Drive, 8th International Traffic Expert Congress, 8 to 9 May, 2014, Warsaw
Impact of ITS on driver’s safety: positive or negative ?
Annie Pauzié, Ifsttar, France
1. Context
Ambitious objectives in Europe have been clearly stated in the European Commission White Paper (2011) dealing with a commitment at the European level to reduce drastically the number of crashes and fatalities on the road, with a perspective of concrete results.
Among several complementary measures, an opportunity to reach this goal is the development and the spreading out of “Information and Communication Technologies” (ICT) aiming at supporting human behavior and efficiency in road context. These technologies, usually labeled “Intelligent Transport System” (ITS) when applied to the transport domain, cover a set of applications designed and implemented to improve transport in a broader sense, including infrastructure, private and public transport and freight. Several ITS applications have been developed in the automotive area to improve road safety such as, for example, detection and alert about safety distance with the previous vehicle, lane keeping, speed and curve warning, collision warning and avoidance, critical road event information, blind spot monitoring and vulnerable road user detection,... So, in terms of road safety, there is a hope in these ITS functions to compensate human deficiencies in terms of perception, decision taking, emergency reactions, but there is also a concern dealing with behavior adaptation and risk compensation while using these functions, and potential interference with the main driving task due to attention sharing induced by the additional task required to manage the on-‐board system (Matthews & all., 2003;Pauzié & all., 2010).
Effective achievement of the expected benefits will depend on conditions of systems design and implementation: in particular, to which extent the system answers to drivers needs, is compatible with their functional capacities whatever their age and their experience or motivation, and satisfies the criteria of relevance, usability and acceptability taking into account the context of use and the characteristic of the individual.
This is true for informative systems that are just transmitting messages to the driver, leaving them with the full manual control of their vehicle. To be used, these systems require additional visual/auditory attention from the driver that can create potential interference with the main driving task, but can also allow potential improvement in terms of decision and reaction processes by alerting the driver concerning critical events and allowing then quicker or more adapted reactions.
This is also true in the case of automation technologies, where assistance systems are able to take care with more reliability of some control tasks traditionally assigned to the driver, and which brings nevertheless the problem of tasks dispatching between human and machine, as well as the choice of the logic used for the management of this control sharing, substitute or co-‐operative (Wilde G.J.S., 1982).
2. Objectives
In order to overcome these negative issues, in-‐vehicle devices have to be intuitive, self-‐explanatory and non intrusive for the driver. Human-‐centred design principles, based upon the fact that systems should take into consideration human specificities in their features (legibility, audibility, timing,…), is an approach relevant at each step of the development: setting up the concept of the system, development of the mock-‐up and the prototype, implementation of the system, with series of iterations to improve the successive versions of the functionnalities (Pauzié, 2012). Based upon the specificity of the ITS applications and the characteristics of the drivers population, human factor investigations have to be conducted to evaluate if there is any benefit for the driver while putting into balance the perceptual and cognitive interference with the gain linked to the system use. This evaluation process requires to develop adapted methodologies and relevant indicators.
Figure: Human centred design approach for ITS (Pauzié, 2012)
Then, ergonomic approach for design and evaluation processes in this context aims at:
• assisting designers to allow quicker and more efficient design process by setting up ergonomic criteria, taking into account the wide heterogeneity of drivers’ needs and requirements
• evaluating safety, acceptability and usability of these devices for the drivers.
In order to process a human-‐centred design, it is necessary to investigate deeply the drivers’ needs and requirements in direct relation with the application features and their relevancy for the driving task at the operational, tactical and strategical level. For example, elderly drivers reported more navigation problems such as way finding with increasing old age and have more difficulties with maneuvers related to gap acceptance for crossing non-‐limited access highways, and high-‐speed lane changes on limited-‐ access highways. So, this population could benefit of an easy access to clear instructions from a system, but difficulties in attention sharing between several informative sources have to be taken into consideration (Emmerson & col., 2012). The novice drivers have difficulties in self-‐calibration, hazard and risk perception. An adequate design of functions supporting the novice driver can induce potential positive consequences in terms of road safety, and the issue raises is the setting up of training program for these innovative functions. Some ITS functions are more devoted to entertaining the driver, such as mobile phone use, or can be developed in the context of professional use, such as connecting electronic mail. Due to the fact that they are irrelevant for the driving task itself, experimental investigations showed that these types of functions are prone to have negative impact on the road safety (McEvoy & col., 2005), and require additional attention demand in comparison with a reference-‐driving situation, where no system would be available.
3. Conclusion
To summarize, driving task is a complex activity and ITS functions have to match with the driver’s expectations, needs, requirements and capacities, if potential positive impact on road safety wants to be achieved. This is really a challenge when realizing that there is a wide heterogeneity of drivers, meaning that the same product has to fit with an important range of contexts and users. The question of designers’ responsibility concerning these systems is also an important aspect to consider in terms of possible misconceptions (Engströn & col., 2005).
The negative or positive impact of ITS implementation on road safety is still a crucial issue to be investigated, renewed in terms of research as technology evolved and as there is an increase widespread use among drivers population.
4. References
Emmerson c., Weihong Guo A., Blythe P., Naldeo A. & Edwards S. (2012) In-‐vehicle navigation systems and older drivers, 19th ITS World Congress, Vienna, Austria, 22/26 October 2012.
Engströn J., Arfwidsson J., Amditis A., Andreone L., Klaus Bengler, K., Cacciabue P.C.,, Johannes Eschler J.,
Nathan F., Janssen W. (2005) Meeting the challenge of future automotive HMI design: an overview of the AIDE integrated project, ITS Mondial congress, San Francisco, US.
EU White Paper (2011), Towards a “zero-‐vision” on road safety.
Matthews R., Legg S., Charlton S., (2003), Distraction, driving, multiple-‐task, workload, performance, Accid Anal Prev, 35 (4), 451-‐7.
McEvoy S., Stevenson M., McCartt A., Woodward M., Haworth C., Palamara P. & Cercarelli R., (2005) Role of mobile phones in motor vehicle crashes resulting in hospital attendance: a case-‐crossover study, British
Medical Journal; 331:428.
Pauzié A. & Amditis A., (2010) Chapter 2: Intelligent Driver Support System functions in cars and their potential consequences on safety, Book “Safety of Intelligent Driver Support Systems: Design, Evaluation, and Social perspectives”, Ashgate (ed.), pp 7-‐25.
Pauzié A., (2012) Concept and development of ergonomic mock up as a tool for mobile Human-‐ Computer Interaction Design, APCHI 2012, 10th Asia Pacific Conference on Computer Human Interaction, August 28-‐31, Matsue, Japan.
Wilde G.J.S., (1982), The theory of risk homeostasis : implications for safety and health ; Risk Analysis, 2, 4, pp. 209-‐225.
