Driving Safe in the Future - HMI for Integrated Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Doctoral thesis, 2009

To be able to drive safely and efficiently, drivers need information from the surrounding traffic environment that make it possible to foresee early events that may negatively affect safety. A driver can in some cases perceive events that potentially have a negative impact on traffic safety, but in other cases not. Therefore, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are being introduced on the market. These systems have the function of actively assisting the driver in avoiding accidents by providing information about current and upcoming traffic situations and helping the driver take proper actions before a potential accident occurs. However, this introduction of new active safety features into our vehicles has resulted in an increase in the number of warnings and information that the driver needs to understand instantly to avoid an accident. One of the major challenges is therefore to integrate these systems to make them work optimally together with the driver. Today the functionality and design of these systems is chiefly based on the research related to the driving concerns in Western countries. Still, with the rapid motorisation in developing countries, there is an increasing need to investigate how cross-cultural differences in such cultures may affect the design of ADAS. The purpose of this thesis is to explore what needs, goals and requirements drivers have of assistance in their driving, how these factors may differ cross-culturally, and what implications this brings into the design of ADAS information. Further, an interface design process and methods included in this process has been developed under the Ecological Interface Design (EID) framework. The results show that the EID framework is a theory that can lead to a good advisory warning interface design. However, this theory lacks practical methods that can be used in this design process. This thesis contributes to the EID framework by including a series of methods to design an ecological interface step by step. The methods included were used to understand environmental, cognitive and technical constraints. In addition to this, they were used to assess the drivers’ understanding of the driving context, something that is not usually targeted in EID. The results also show that providing drivers with advisory information can have a positive effect on driver behaviour and make the driver more aware of the traffic situation. This advisory information can assist the driver by revealing goal-relevant constraints of the environment to help the driver understand the safety margins and thus, drive safer. However, if full benefits of an advisory interface are to be realised, cross-cultural differences must be taken into consideration. It is clear that, even though traffic rules and regulations are similar in two countries, driver behaviour is highly culturally mediated. This behaviour affect how drivers accept information from ADAS and in what situations they prefer this assistance. Even though the advisory interface concept affected driver behaviour positively in both Sweden and China, the detailed design needs to be adapted to the specific market in order to gain driver acceptance.