Driver Workload Effects of Cell Phone, Music Player, and Text Messaging Tasks with the Ford SYNC Voice Interface versus Handheld Visual-Manual Interfaces

2009-01-0786

04/20/2009

Event
SAE World Congress & Exhibition
Authors Abstract
Content
A fixed-base driving simulator study was conducted to compare driver performance and eye glance behavior effects of tasks performed using the voice interface in Ford Motor Company’s SYNC® system versus handheld operation of portable music players and cellular phones. Data were analyzed from a sample of 25 test participants. All test participants were regular SYNC users (but not SYNC developers), though they varied in their familiarity with SYNC functions. During a car-following scenario at highway speeds on the simulator, the participants performed 7 tasks using SYNC’s voice interface and those same 7 tasks with their own handheld music player and cellular phone. The seven tasks under test were: dial a 10-digit number; call a specific person from a phonebook; receive a call while driving; play a specific song; play songs from a specific artist; review (listen to or read) a text message; and select a reply from a list or type a reply to a text message. Task-level paired comparisons are reported for total eyes-off-road time, standard deviation of lane position, percentage of trials with one or more lane exceedances, speed variability, and response time to a visual detection task. Consistent with prior voice interface literature, driving distraction potential for most tasks was minimized when the SYNC voice interface was used as compared to the visual-manual interfaces of the handheld devices.
Meta TagsDetails
DOI
https://doi.org/10.4271/2009-01-0786
Pages
9
Citation
Shutko, J., Mayer, K., Laansoo, E., and Tijerina, L., "Driver Workload Effects of Cell Phone, Music Player, and Text Messaging Tasks with the Ford SYNC Voice Interface versus Handheld Visual-Manual Interfaces," SAE Technical Paper 2009-01-0786, 2009, https://doi.org/10.4271/2009-01-0786.
Additional Details
Publisher
Published
Apr 20, 2009
Product Code
2009-01-0786
Content Type
Technical Paper
Language
English