Development and Evaluation of Information Communication Control Systems for Reducing Driver Distraction

The authors are studying communication navigation techniques which control communication according to the particular driving environment. To achieve this, it is necessary to quantify the driving workload and the communication workload in different driving situations, and control communication based on this data. This paper discusses the modeling of the allocation of information processing capability between driving and communication in terms of recognition resource bandwidth, and presents methods for estimating the allocation of information processing capability and workload in the presence of an aural recognition task. The proposed method has been verified through a line-of-vision analysis in an experiment using an actual car. The experiment revealed that aural communicative tasks, in particular those requiring sentence comprehension, have significant effects on the line of vision. The paper shows that the information processing capability for recognizing aural information is proportional to the aural information processing load ( R² =0.903). It finally describes a prototype of an e-mail control system.