Preliminary Study for Feasibility of Driver Agent in Actual Car Environment<br/>—Driver Agent for Encouraging Safe Driving Behavior (3)

Abstract

Japan has become a more aged society and there are more drivers, 65 years of age and above. Cars represent an important mode of transportation for the elderly; however, in recent years, the number of traffic accidents caused by elderly drivers has been on the rise, and this has become a social issue. Thus, for the elderly drivers to encourage them to improve their driving, we study a driver agent system which consist s of smartphone, communication robot and cloud service and provides the driving support by attention awakening and the feedback support based on driving behavior evaluation. In this paper, we presented a summary of the proposed agent and reported on a set of preliminary experiments using our agent in an actual car environment. From the analysis of subjective evaluations and fixation points during driving, the results revealed the possibility that the drivers accept the agent and supports from the agent during driving and that the agent in an actual car environment did not distract the driver.