Affective computing to help recognizing mistaken pedal-pressing during accidental braking

Abstract

Affective computing has been used to improve computer usability and user interface, by considering user’s emotion. One aspect of affective computing is emotion recognition. There have been many researches regarding emotion recognition, yet there is still room for exploration in applying affective computing into a driver assistance system. On driving assistance, one aspect is about emergency braking. Several researches have been analyzing emergency braking and proposed approaches to detect them. A more focused but significant (especially for elderly and beginner driver) case is mistakenly pressing accelerator instead of brake pedal during emergency braking, which often leads to accidents. This paper investigates researches on affective computing, affective sensors, emergency braking, and mistaken pedal pressing. It is also investigating on a possible approach to realize the objective of improving the existing driving assistance system using affective computing, on the case of mistaken pedal-pressing during emergency braking. For preliminary experiment, driving simulator’s brake pedal is manipulated to act as accelerator pedal during emergency braking, while observing driver’s change of expression, and measuring time approximation.