UDRIVE Coordinator Nicole Van Nes (SWOV) presented UDRIVE at the 4th International Conference on Driver Distraction and Inattention (DDI2015), which took place on 9-11 November 2015 n Sydney, Australia.
Driver distraction and inattention continue to be significant road safety problems. DDI2015 aimed to bring participants up-to-date on recent developments and trends in the field, and to bring together researchers and practitioners.
The major themes for the conference included distraction and the automated vehicle, and the relationship between research findings yielded in experimental versus real world studies.
In referring to real-world studies, Nicole Van Nes focused on the analysis of distraction and inattention data within UDRIVE. After a generic introduction to the project and its methodology, the project coordinator explained the main research questions relevant to the DDI2015 public, i.e.:
Proactive attention selection mechanisms:
-What factors determine how drivers proactively allocate their attention in anticipation of how a driving situation will unfold?
–Why do these proactive selection mechanisms sometimes fail?
Reactive attention selection mechanisms:
–Which perceptual cues reliably capture attention and trigger avoidance manoeuvres in safety critical events?
–Why do the reactive attention capture mechanisms identified sometimes fail and lead to crashes?
Feedback from participants was very positive regarding the DAS. They were impressed by the DAS as “it measures a lot”, more than DASses from other Naturalistic Driving studies around the globe. However, some of them recommended to syncronize definitions and triggers used to find SCE’s between projects to increase comparability and efficiency.
