Route Guidance Modality for Elder Driver Navigation

Differences in perceptual and cognitive abilities between the young and elderly have implications for in-car tasks. As a primary example, although in-car navigation systems enhance situational awareness, this comes at the cost of increasing visual distraction and cognitive load. To address these shortcomings, this paper explores the efficacy of multi-modal cues for providing route guidance information. We present the results of a study evaluating the impact of multi-modal feedback on driving performance and cognitive load. We found that the full combination of visual, auditory, and haptic feedback was generally most useful to reduce way-finding errors. However, our study highlighted a number of differences between elder and younger drivers for their safer navigation. Adding more modalities strained the already high workload of elder drivers. In contrast, adding haptic feedback to traditional audio and visual feedback led to more attentive driving by younger drivers. Therefore, for elder drivers, navigation systems need to be personalized to enhance the benefit of auditory feedback without increasing the number of sensory feedbacks. For younger drivers, it is necessary to incorporate new non-visual feedback to minimize distractions caused by visual feedback. We demonstrate these results through task performance-based measures, subjective workload measures and through objective workload measures that use psychophysiological responses of participants to predict a driver’s cognitive load in near real-time.