Tailoring mobile apps for safe on-road usage: how an interaction concept enables safe interaction with hotel booking, news, Wolfram Alpha and Facebook

Abstract

This paper presents an automotive interaction concept called GetHomeSafe that allows drivers to book hotels, browse news and use both Wolfram Alpha and Facebook safely during driving. GetHomeSafe includes a natural speech dialog system and a graphical user interface both adapted to drivers' needs. In addition to a description of the interaction concept, we report the results of a real-car driving study. To assess the driving safety subjective and objective data on GetHomeSafe usage were gathered and compared with the usage of respective apps on a mounted tablet. In order to combine information about eye-gaze and head-pose of the driver, we used the EyeVIUS system [1] to get the drivers' focus-of-attention. The results indicate that it seems to be safer to use GetHomeSafe compared to the apps on a mounted tablet. One reason is that the subjective load and the distraction while using the mounted tablet is higher for most of the drivers. Moreover, the GetHomeSafe interaction concept received favorable usability ratings.