Search Results

Objective tools that can assess the demands associated with in-vehicle human machine interfaces (HMIs) could assist automotive engineers designing safer interaction. This paper presents empirical evidence supporting one objective assessment approach, which compares the demand associated with in-vehicle tasks to the demand associated with “benchmarking” or “comparison tasks”. In the presented study, there were two types of benchmarking tasks-a modified surrogate reference task (SuRT) and a delayed digit recall task (n-back task) - representing different levels of visual demand and cognitive demand respectively. Twenty-four participants performed these two types of benchmarking tasks as well as two radio tasks while driving a vehicle on a closed-loop test track. Response measures included physiological (heart rate), glance metrics, driving performance (steering entropy) and subjective workload ratings.