Auditory In-Vehicle Technologies to Support Older Drivers

Population aging, in combination with improved health care and more active lifestyles well into advanced age, have resulted in an increased number of older adults driving more miles than ever before. Unfortunately, these older drivers are over-represented in motor vehicle crashes and crash-related fatalities. Rather than the risk-tasking behaviors observed in young drivers, the collisions of older drivers frequently involve perceptual-cognitive errors. Advanced in-vehicle technologies have the potential to function as sensory-cognitive aids and may offset the negative impact of age-related changes in sensory and cognitive abilities. Collision Avoidance Systems (CASs) function as sensory aids to augment hazard detection capabilities, and therefore may be of particular benefit to older drivers. Navigation aids can offset the working memory requirements of wayfinding, and auditory guidance directions may reduce the visual demands of searching for street signs and reading maps. However, these advanced systems also have the potential to increase the information processing demands of the driving task or distract drivers, particularly if they are not designed in accordance with the sensory and perceptual capabilities of older adults. A series of experiments aimed at examining the impact of sensory-cognitive characteristics of auditory navigational aids on driver wayfinding, performance on a visual peripheral detection task, and neurophysiological, behavioral and subjective indices of driver mental workload and performance were conducted.