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Soon, autonomous cars are expected to become widespread, but at present, it is still common for people to drive cars manually. A driving support agent (DSA) is used to support driving using the human-agent interaction approach. In previous research, it was shown that DSAs can be useful in assisting the user through voice utterances. However, previous studies focusing on DSA utterance design have not compared off-record strategies with other politeness strategies that explicitly communicate the speaker's intentions, and it was not clear whether DSA should provide explicit utterances to the user. Therefore, in this study, a video-based subjective evaluation experiment (n=240) was conducted to compare the acceptability of off-record strategies, positive politeness strategies, negative politeness strategies, and direct utterances without politeness strategies. The results of the experiment showed that the negative politeness strategy was evaluated significantly higher than the off-record strategy on evaluation items related to functionality. This result suggests the usefulness of providing explicit instructions with linguistic consideration (politeness) when DSA provides driving assistance to users. In addition to the above findings, there were several correlations between the user's personality characteristics and the subjective evaluation of the DSA. Specifically, there was a significant positive correlation between the level of conscientiousness of the user and the direct utterance evaluation value. For the positive politeness strategy and off-record strategy, there were no significant correlations between evaluation categories of the dislikeability and users' personality characteristics. These results suggest that individual differences in n egative impressions due to personality characteristics are small in the positive politeness and off-record strategies.

Cars represent an important mode of transportation for the elderly; however, in recent years, the number of traffic accidents caused by elderly drivers in Japan has increased. Thus, to ensure driving safety, we are researching a driver agent system that provides driving support and feedback support to elderly drivers to encourage them to improve their driving. In this paper, we report on a set of preliminary experiments using our agent in an actual car environment designed to evaluate the subjective acceptability of and distraction by the agent based on subjective evaluation and analysis of driver fixation points during driving. The results revealed that the acceptability of the agent was high and that the agent in an actual car environment did not distract the driver.

In recent years, the number of traffic accidents caused by elderly drivers in Japan has increased. Cars are an important mode of transportation for the elderly. Thus, to ensure their driving safety, a system that can assist elderly drivers is required. In this study, we propose a driver agent system that provides support to elderly drivers during and after driving and encourages them to improve their driving. In this paper, we describe the proposed driver agent system. We conducted an experiment to evaluate driving behavior improvement through three types of support: driving support, review support, and a combination of both. The results revealed that the combination of both supports lead to the greatest improvements in driving behavior and was most acceptable to elderly drivers.

In recent years, the number of traffic accidents caused by elderly drivers has increased in Japan. However, a car is an important mode of transportation for the elderly. Therefore, to ensure safe driving, a system that can assist elderly drivers is required. In this study, we propose a driver-agent system that provides support to elderly drivers during and after driving and encourages them to improve their driving. This paper describes the prototype system based on the analysis of the teaching records of a human instructor, and the subjective evaluation of driving support to elderly driver from three different agent forms, a voice, visual, and robot. The result revealed the robot form is more noticeable, familiar, and acceptable to the elderly than other forms.