Development of fMRI-Compatible Steering Reaction Force Generation Unit

A major hurdle in the development of automobiles that are easy to operate and pleasant to drive is ignorance of the influence of the characteristics of the steering force on the driver based on an understanding of the brain. To address this problem, it is suitable to measure brain activity by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which can measure activity in the entire brain at a high spatial resolution. In this study, we develop an fMRI-compatible steering force generation unit and verify its performance. To avoid disturbance due to the electromagnetic field of the MRI, the unit was configured as follows: a motor installed outside a scan room generated a reaction force that was transmitted to a steering wheel placed in the hands of a subject using a nonmagnetic transmission unit. To verify the performance of the unit, we measured the brain activity of participants of an experiment by using fMRI while they performed steering operations using their arm/arms under various steering forces. The results were consistent with those for motor-related brain activity obtained in past neuroimaging studies. We conclude that the proposed unit can measure brain activity through fMRI in the presence of a steering reaction force.