Influence of Age and Gender on the Reaction Performance in Human-Vehicle Interaction

Excess workload in vehicle control and inappropriateness of the common two interaction modalities seeing and hearing requires to consider ways and means for new interaction capabilities in vehicles. We have investigated haptic force displays for transmitting feedback from vehicular services to the driving person by using vibro-tactile elements integrated into the car seat and backrest. A haptic display would be implicit perceivable and passive in its attentiveness, and would furthermore display only private messages. Empirical studies regarding reaction times for the different modalities vision, sound, and touch, as well as age- and genderdependent evaluations have been conducted, with the aim to identify general conditions for an all-purpose vehicle interaction system and to justify the usage of haptic feedback. Experimental data have been acquired in a simulated driving environment in order to guarantee safety for test persons, repeatability of the experiment itself, and similar conditions for each test run.