Acceptance of elderly drivers for proactive intervention system

With the aging of the population, traffic accidents caused by elderly drivers have become one of the most common social problems. Although the number of traffic accidents in Japan has been decreasing year by year due to recent advances in traffic accident prevention technology and legal amendments, the number of traffic accidents involving elderly drivers is still high. It has been pointed out that such technologies may not be effective for elderly drivers whose abilities in perception, recognition, judgment, and operation have deteriorated. Therefore, in order to prevent traffic accidents without relying on the decreased driving skills of elderly drivers, we are researching technologies that make the car itself intelligent and intervene in motion control of the vehicle.

With the recent development of automated driving technology, the technology itself has been developed for vehicles to autonomously recognize the driving environment and control the vehicle as necessary. However, the goal of this research is not just fully autonomous driving, but a system that maintains the driver's autonomy and executes control interventions as necessary. For this reason, it is necessary to discuss the desirable form of control intervention, but there has not been much knowledge on this point in the past. In this study, we first reproduced a simple control intervention system on a driving simulator and conducted an evaluation experiment with the participation of elderly drivers. The overall tendency was that the acceptability of the proactive braking intervention was relatively good, but the evaluation of the proactive steering intervention was noticeably low. It was pointed out that the reason for the low acceptability rating was that it was unclear what kind of control the vehicle was trying to achieve. In order to solve this problem, the development of an HMI that shares information about the vehicle's decision criteria and control interventions is considered to be effective. In addition, the construction of a human-machine shared system using haptic guidance for steering is also considered to be useful.

Related Papers

Takuma Ito, Tatsuya Shino, and Minoru Kamata, "Initial Investigation of Elderly Drivers' Acceptability for Proactive Intervention by Intelligent Vehicle", International Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems Research, 16(1), pp.51-65, doi:10.1007/s13177-017-0137-3.

Takuma Ito, Hiroki Takei, and Minoru Kamata, "Reaction Tendencies of Elderly Drivers to Various Target Paths of Proactive Steering Intervention System in Human-Machine Shared Framework", International Journal of Automotive Engineering, 10(1), pp.6-13, doi: 10.20485/jsaeijae.10.1_6.

Information sharing system to improve acceptance of proactive intervention

Intelligent vehicles, such as autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems, are intervening in the steering and braking control of vehicles independently of the driver's intentions. In such a case, if the driver does not understand the intentions and future behavior of the system, there is a concern that the driver may not accept the system and may discontinue using it. Therefore, it is necessary to provide drivers with a system to share information about the intentions and future behavior of control intervention systems. Therefore, we conducted research on an information sharing system that assumes a HUD.

Since this study assumes that elderly drivers will use the HUD, we are concerned that if we overload the HUD with information, users will be overwhelmed with information and become confused. On the other hand, if the information is reduced too much, the original purpose of the HUD cannot be achieved, and the decrease in acceptability of the proactive intervention system may not be resolved. Therefore, in this study, we tried to convey sufficient information to users with a small number of contents by combining information presentation contents along the time axis. Specifically, in the initial stage of the research, we used a driving simulator to evaluate the basic elements that make up the information contents individually and in combination. In addition, based on the guidelines obtained from the simulator experiments, we installed the prototype system on an actual experimental vehicle capable of proactive intervention and evaluated it on a test course. As a result, we confirmed that the information sharing system can improve the acceptability of the proactive intervention.

Proposal of information sharing contents on proactive braking intervention (simulator experiment)

Proposal of information sharing contents on proactive steering intervention (simulator experiment)

Related Papers

Takuma Ito, Tatsuya Shino, and Minoru Kamata, "Information Sharing to Improve Understanding of Proactive Braking Intervention for Elderly Drivers", International Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems Research, 16(3), pp. 173-186, doi: 10.1007/s13177-017-0147-1.

Takuma Ito, Tatsuya Shino, and Minoru Kamata, "Information Sharing to Improve Understanding of Proactive Steering Intervention for Elderly Drivers", International Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems Research, 17(1), pp. 18-31, doi: 10.1007/s13177-018-0153-y.

Takuma Ito, Tatsuya Shino, and Minoru Kamata, "Effectiveness of Information Sharing to Improve Elderly Drivers' Acceptability for Proactive Intervention Systems", International Journal of Automotive Engineering , 10(1), pp. 55-64, doi: 10.20485/jsaeijae.10.1_55.

Takuma Ito, Masatsugu Soya, Satoshi Nakamura, So Saito, Nobuyuki Uchida, and Minoru Kamata, "Acceptability of a Proactive Braking Intervention System by Elderly Drivers Using an Actual Vehicle", International Journal of Automotive Engineering, 9(4), pp. 186-194, doi: 10.20485/jsaeijae.9.4_186.