Toward an Adaptive Situational Awareness Support System for Urban Driving

A lack of sufficient situational awareness is a primary cause of traffic crashes due to human error. Redirecting a driver’s attention to critical objects is essential, but alerting driver about all critical objects can lead to distraction. This paper develops and evaluates an adaptive support system that incorporates drivers’ fixations as a proxy for their situational awareness. We implement an experimental system that detects a driver’s gaze on important objects in the traffic scene and adapts a cueing strategy in an augmented reality-based driver awareness assistance interface. We collect and analyze data from 15 participants and show that our adaptive support system strategy is effective without increasing the drivers’ cognitive workload. Finally, we show that our system can increase ratio of drivers’ fixations on critical objects in their view without significantly increasing dwell time per object.