Development and evaluation of communication navigator for driving environments

The progress in mobile multimedia devices has made it easier to conduct mobile multimedia communication while driving. The authors have conceived a communication navigator for driving environments, which is designed to ensure safe driving during multimedia communication. The communication navigator is intended to provide safety without sacrificing comfort in communication, by controlling multimedia communication on the basis of the state of the driving environment. We developed a prototype system to confirm empirically the validity of the selected indicator (steering operation) and its threshold. The results obtained from the prototype system were compared with the data collected on real driving on the road. Experiments were conducted with test subjects to verify that steering operation was a useful parameter for control. The experimental results showed that the communication navigator is three times as effective in reducing the collision probability compared with using handsfree equipment alone.