Enabling Responsible Driving with Personal Productivity Tools 2002-21-0055

Mobile professionals spend many hours each day driving between appointments as an essential part of their work. Others spend significant amounts of time commuting to and from their place of work. If these drivers can responsibly make productive use of their time behind the wheel, they will have strong motivation to do more than just drive while in their car.

Some key statistics for the US:

• 60-80% of cellular phone calls originate or continue inside the vehicle ^I
• At least 43% of PDA owners say they have used their PDA while driving ^II
• Over 17% of laptop users report using their laptop in their car ^III
• On average, 500,000 drivers are using a cell-phone at any point in time ^IV
• Between 4,000 and 8,000 traffic accidents occur daily due to some form of driver distraction ^V

Clearly a large number of drivers are already using personal productivity devices such as phones, PDAs, pagers and computers to make themselves more productive in the car. However many of these devices pose the danger of driver distraction.

In this paper we examine the use of these same devices together with new human interface technologies using speech as both input and output. Together these are designed to resolve simultaneously the apparently conflicting challenge of responsible driving and personal productivity. Finally, the paper presents a case study of the MobileAria solution, which successfully meets this challenge.