Brain Function and Autonomic Nervous System Activity While Switching from Automatic to Manual Operation in a Jumping-Out Event

Developing autonomous vehicles is highly desirable, especially for elderly people and in local areas. We investigated physiological features during the transition from autonomous to manual driving in an emergency case. We observed a temporal change in the frontal cerebral blood flow during an emergency. Time-frequency analysis to evaluate the autonomic nervous system activity (i.e., instantaneous heart rate variability) indicated increased sympathetic nervous activity (i.e., blunted parasympathetic nervous activity) while switching from autonomous to manual driving.