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Steve Summerskill
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With in-car gadgets on the increase, and driver inattention one of the major causes of road traffic accidents, researchers from Design and Technology have utilised the sense of touch to help drivers control key systems and, crucially, keep their eyes on the road. Hannah Baldwin investigates.
Every driver is guilty of it. You reach for the heating controls or lean over to retune the radio, just momentarily taking your eyes off the road. When you look back up the car has drifted, if you’re lucky not by much, but enough to cause you concern. Research by experts in America has shown that a staggering 93% of road traffic accidents can be attributed to driver inattention, and with ever more gadgets and complicated functions being built into cars, it’s not difficult to see why our attention can be so easily diverted away from the road.
Steve Summerskill, a lecturer from the Department of Design and Technology, has spent the last few years working with partner organisations to address this issue. “I began looking at this as a research associate, with the late Professor Mark Porter,” he says. “We wanted to demonstrate that accessing complex technology whilst driving could be made safer by being less demanding on the driver, both visually and mentally. So we set about developing an ‘eyes-free’ prototype interface that would allow drivers to access secondary controls – for the heating and ventilation, sat-nav system and in-car entertainment – while minimising the need to look away from the road.”
Entitled BIONIC – Blind operatION of In-car Controls – the project was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Foresight Vehicle LINK Programme. Working with Dr Gary Burnett, an expert in driver distraction from the University of Nottingham, the team began by looking at how existing products are used by visually impaired people.
“We worked with them to see how they interact with products they’re unfamiliar with, looking at the kind of tactile cues they found useful, what constituted good and bad tactile coding. It really was quite a novel way of working – drawing on the experiences of non-expert users for a driving context.”
During their research, the team discovered a direct link between the tactile and the visual senses. “If you’re using tactile coding on an object that involves orientation, you use the visual parts of your brain to form a picture of that object in your head, meaning your eyes might be looking straight ahead, but you’re not actually seeing what’s there. We needed to build an association between the visual and the tactile experience very quickly to reduce the chances of this happening,” says Steve.
For each control the team tried to associate the arrangement of the interface with an iconic layout people might recognise. “The structure of our in-car entertainment interface, for example, is similar to that of an iPod. Because most people already have a visual image of that, we believed they’d quickly be able to use our interface. In the same way that you don’t need to look at your buckle location when you’re putting your seat belt on, that ‘automatic’ processing would take over.”
Once the team had determined the design of the interface, they needed to consider its positioning in the car. For this they utilised SAMMIE CAD – a computer-based Human Modelling tool, devised by researchers at Loughborough and Nottingham universities.
“SAMMIE allows you to create digital mannequins that represent people of differing sizes. It can also evaluate people’s reach. So together with our data on how joints move, we were able to say a person of ‘this size’ with an elbow angle of ‘this much’ would be comfortable using an interface positioned in this place in the car, but not in this position.”
The team’s lead industrial partner in the project was Honda R&D, who agreed to supply a Honda Civic for the researchers to use as a test vehicle for the interface. The unusual layout of the car, however, presented some issues for the team.
“The Civic has a dashboard-mounted gear stick, positioned in a location that would have been ideal for our interface,” Steve says. “We found we couldn’t place the controls above this, because it meant smaller users had to lean forward in their seat to reach them, so we eventually decided to locate the interface between the two front seats.”
A working prototype was then developed in conjunction with Visteon – a company that designs, engineers and manufactures a range of innovative products for car manufacturers – and installed in the demonstrator vehicle for a series of road trials. These revealed a 17 per cent reduction in the ‘eyes off road’ time when using the heating and ventilation system, and a 20 per cent reduction for the satellite navigation function. However, there was no real reduction in the glance duration for the in-car entertainment system.
“It was located too far back and therefore users found it difficult to look at quickly,” explains Steve. “It showed us there’s a physical threshold beyond which people aren’t comfortable glancing. That’s something we’ll be exploring further in the future.”
The results of the study have enabled the researchers to develop a set of guidelines for the motor industry on the design of ‘eyes-free’ interfaces, which could ultimately prove valuable in other industries. As Steve points out, it’s not only car drivers who need to interact with technology while on the move. “Those who operate machinery, the armed forces… any visual distraction could have serious safety implications for these people. The guidelines we’ve drawn up could ultimately have benefits beyond just the car industry. This initial research has shown us that people will interact with tactile designs. Now we just need to understand that even better.”
