Field of safe travel: Using location and motion information to increase driver acceptance of pedestrian alerts

Abstract

We investigated five contextual variables likely to influence driver acceptance of alerts to pedestrians issued by a night vision active safety system. Two of the five, pedestrian location and motion, were found to influence ratings. Hierarchical regression revealed that a nominal characterization of pedestrian location and two quantitative measures of motion explain more than 61% of the variance in driver ratings and do not interact. We discuss the implications of this finding for the specification of the system's alerting strategies.