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Highlights • Online survey revealed most common phone function for young adults while driving was music. • Differences in phone functions while driving were identified by licence type. • Focus group themes for phone use while driving were for entertainment, to connect and navigation. • Targeted interventions should acknowledge the multiple phone functions used while driving. Abstract Background Mobile phone use while driving is a well-recognized area of concern. However, while texting/calling among young adult drivers has received much research attention, more research is needed regarding other phone functions used by young adults while driving. Study aim To explore mobile phone functions used by young adult drivers while driving. Results An online survey of 17–24 year old drivers (N = 612; 428 females) and focus groups with drivers aged (N = 18; 8 females) revealed that mobile phone use while driving was a very common behavior, with more full licence drivers compared with Learner/Provisional drivers using their phone to make/answer calls, send/read text messages and for internet browsing. This nature of mobile phone use while driving was varied, with phones commonly used for entertainment (e.g., to play music), to connect with others (via texting and/or voice calls) and for navigation. Concluding remarks Young adults use a variety of functions on their phone while driving. It is important that young driver-targeted intervention efforts acknowledge that multiple functions of the mobile phone are used during the drive and it serves multiple purposes. Examining the inhibitors and facilitators of mobile phone use and its various functions while driving is needed, in addition to elucidating if the usage of particular mobile phone functions is similar across different driver cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Older adults are the fastest growing segment of the driving population. While there is a strong emphasis for older people to maintain their mobility, the safety of older drivers is a serious community concern. Frailty and declines in a range of age-related sensory, cognitive, and physical impairments can place older drivers at an increased risk of crash-related injuries and death. A number of studies have indicated that in-vehicle technologies such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and In-Vehicle Information Systems (IVIS) may provide assistance to older drivers. However, these technologies will only benefit older drivers if their design is congruent with the complex needs and diverse abilities of this driving cohort. The design of ADAS and IVIS is largely informed by automotive Human Machine Interface (HMI) guidelines. However, it is unclear to what extent the declining sensory, cognitive and physical capabilities of older drivers are addressed in the current guidelines. This paper provides a review of key current design guidelines for IVIS and ADAS with respect to the extent they address age-related changes in functional capacities. The review revealed that most of the HMI guidelines do not address design issues related to older driver impairments. In fact, in many guidelines driver age and sensory cognitive and physical impairments are not mentioned at all and where reference is made, it is typically very broad. Prescriptive advice on how to actually design a system so that it addresses the needs and limitations of older drivers is not provided. In order for older drivers to reap the full benefits that in-vehicle technology can afford, it is critical that further work establish how older driver limitations and capabilities can be supported by the system design process, including their inclusion into HMI design guidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data collected from in-depth road accident investigations are very informative and may contain more than 500 accident-related variables for a single investigated case. These data may be used to get a more detailed knowledge on accident and injury causation associated with a specific accident scenario. However, due to their complexity, studies using in-depth data at aggregated levels are not common. The objective of this paper is to propose a methodology to analyse aggregated accident causation charts in order to highlight strong and weak relationships between crash causes and pre-crash scenarios. These relationships can be taken into account when developing or assessing new road safety measures (e.g. in-vehicle systems). The methodology has been applied to an in-depth accident dataset derived from the European project SafetyNet. Four different pre-crash scenarios associated with the accident scenario ‘vehicles encountering something while remaining in their lane’ have been investigated. Even if generalization of these results should be done with care because of database representativeness issues, the methodology is promising, highlighting, for example, a well-defined causation pattern related to vehicles striking a vehicle in rear-end accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyzes the information delivery delay for the purpose of roadside unit (RSU) deployment in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) with intermittent connectivity. A mathematical model is developed to describe the relationship between the average delay for delivering road condition information and the deployment distance between two neighbor RSUs. The derived mathematical model considers a sparse highway scenario where two neighbor RSUs are deployed at a distance without a direct connection, and vehicles are sparsely distributed on the road with road condition information randomly generated between the two neighbor RSUs. Moreover, the model takes into account the vehicle speed, the vehicle density, the likelihood of an incident, and the deployment distance between two neighbor RSUs. The correctness and accuracy of the derived mathematical model is verified, and the impacts of different parameters on the average information delivery delay are investigated through simulation results. Given an information delivery delay constraint for time-critical applications, this model can be used to estimate the maximum deployment distance allowed between two neighbor RSUs, which can provide a reference for the deployment of RSUs in such scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The modern vehicle has evolved into a multimedia hub, becoming a vital integration and delivery point for a panoply of media and devices. However, the resulting in-vehicle noise pollution created by this multitude of services has significant potential to become annoying to all vehicle occupants. This problem motivated the authors to build a system that enables the configuration of in-vehicle personalized audio zones (PAZs) that don't require earphones. The PAZ system comprises a novel user interface, custom-designed headrests, and an infotainment noise-control subsystem. The performance evaluations of PAZ in a BMW 5 series sedan delivered approximately 20 decibels of isolation, which resulted in an overwhelmingly positive subjective experience for the occupants. PAZ not only ameliorates noise pollution, but also provides a unique solution to sound personalization via configurable audio zones and individual media selection that doesn't require headphones. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Today's high-end vehicles are technologically more sophisticated and smarter than the 'old machines with engine and wheels'. These vehicles are anticipated to provide consumers with safe, reliable, and infotainment-rich driving experience through intelligent transportation system, realized through a technology referred to as vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). VANET offers a plethora of applications to the consumers ranging from safety to infotainment. Among other messages defined by the dedicated short range communication standard, cooperative awareness messages (CAMs) are of paramount importance for the VANET applications. In VANET, vehicles share their frequent mobility information in the form of CAMs with neighbors for cooperative awareness, traffic view construction, maneuver, and cruise control. In this work we target the CAM-based traffic information dissemination. VANET applications construct short-range local and long-range extend traffic views with the information contained in scheduled CAMs (also known as beacons). To construct aforementioned traffic views, naïve approach is multi-hop communication; however, historically multi-hop communication does not scale efficiently in dynamic VANET due to computational and communication overhead. Therefore another alternative approach is essential to address the problems of the multi-hop communication in highly ephemeral VANET and to achieve maximum degree of the information dissemination in VANET. To fill the gap, in this paper we propose a geocast-based abstract piggybacking mechanism for traffic information dissemination in VANET through single-hop CAMs. In the proposed scheme, vehicles compress their local traffic view constructed through single-hop CAMs. The compressed local traffic view is referred to as traffic data unit (TDU). Every vehicle broadcasts its own TDU along with a number of TDUs received from other vehicles in the next scheduled CAM, in order to construct a long-range extended traffic view, also known as compressed data word (CDW). In other words, CDW is encapsulated into normal CAM in order to share it with the neighbors in the vicinity. The receivers of CDW use the received TDUs to construct the desired length of the long-range extended traffic view. The proposed scheme leverages only single-hop beacons data to construct both local and extended traffic views. Our simulation results show that the extended traffic view up to 1 km can be constructed with only single-hop beacons at the expense of 10 % of extra information with the regular CAM. The results also show that the effect of the extra overhead is not phenomenal from overhead standpoint. The proposed virtual multi-hop communication paradigm with single-hop CAM will reduce the overall communication thereby saving the bandwidth for other important safety related communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We evaluated how severely in-vehicle video watching brings motion sickness. [•] Video-watching aggravated motion sickness 2.7 times as much as ordinary car-riding. [•] Video-watching aggravated motion sickness 25% less severely than book-reading. [•] A statistical protocol was introduced to analyze incomplete within-subject data. [•] The new model can handle missing entries and capture the time-course development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article discusses the key outcomes from scientific literature regarding distraction and driving performance. It focuses on the impact of in-vehicle tasks on visual scanning and driving performance which are key to safety and can be affected by distraction. It concluded that involvement in in-vehicle tasks can result to changes in the manner in which drivers sample the world and can also adversely affect performance along important dimensions of vehicle control and hazard avoidance. INSET: 177.

The article provides an overview of General Motor Corp.'s (GM) approach to manage driver workload, including some background on guidelines from the Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers in the U.S. It states that GM has developed formal requirements for driver workload to ensure consistency and discipline for product assessments. Included are the guiding principles of GM for telematic and infotainment systems and assessment of the secondary systems and features for communication.

The article discusses new technologies being developed to prevent driver inattention and distraction. Several emerging technology-based safety countermeasures placed in a conceptual framework including Safe Designs According to Guidelines and Standards, integration, and driver coaching are discussed. It notes that distraction and inattention countermeasure technologies are showing great potential to improve crash safety and that future driver will be assisted by attention technology.

The article highlights research that discuss design and training interventions that can be employed to reduce the effects of driver distraction. It mentions that the impact of distractions caused by in-vehicle information systems can be mitigated through design interventions such as advising and locking automation strategies, and speech-based systems. It notes aside from design intervention, training can also reduce the distracting effects of concurrent tasks.