Testing a Commercial BCI Device for In-Vehicle Interfaces Evaluation: A Simulator and Real-World Driving Study

This study is assessing the sensitivity of an affordable BCI device in the context of driver distraction in both low-fidelity simulator and real-world driving environments. Twenty-three participants performed a car following task while using a smartphone application involving a range of generic smartphone widgets. On the first hand, the results demonstrated that secondary task completion time is a fairly robust metric as it is sensitive to user-interfaces style while being consistent between the two driving environments. On the second hand, while the BCI attention level metric was not sensitive to the different user-interfaces, we found it to be significantly higher in the real-driving environment than in the simulated one, which reproduces findings obtained with medical-grade sensors.