Enhancing Safety by Augmenting Information Acquisition in the Driving Environment

According to the National Center for Statistics (NCSA), over 6 million motor vehicle crashes occurred in the United States in 2006. These crashes resulted in 42,642 deaths and approximately 2.6 million injuries. Many of these crashes result from a mismatch between the attentional and perceptual capabilities of drivers and the demands of the driving environment. A recent naturalistic study monitored 100 drivers in their own vehicles for 1 year and found that approximately 85% of the crashes and near crashes resulted from some attentional failure, including fatigue and distraction. These data demonstrate a fundamental problem that plagues driving safety: People have evolved to 2-10 mph locomotion, but not the demands of 20-100 mph locomotion. This mismatch leads to circumstance in which the demands of driving exceed the capacity of the driver to respond. Recent advances in sensor and computing technology may reduce these mismatches by augmenting the driver’s ability to acquire relevant information. For example, radar-based sensors can scan the road ahead and detect cars that might pose a hazard to the driver, and algorithms can process these data to deliver a warning to help the driver avoid an impending collision. However, achieving the promise of such systems is far from certain.