Driver’s situational awareness and impact of phone interface modality in conventional and semi-autonomous vehicles

Abstract

This project investigated how different modes of interaction of drivers with a smartphone (i.e., manual texting vs. voice usage) affected driver’s situational awareness in both conventional and semi-automated vehicles. The study, which was executed in a human-in-the-loop setting, shows that participants expressed personal preferences for the vocal interface in all the tested scenarios. However, few metrics actually showed statistical significance and an improvement of performance with the vocal interface as compared to the manual one.