Basic Study for New Assistive Technology Based on Brain Activity During Car Driving

Recently, it is necessary to develop a new system which assists driving car and wheelchair as aged society. The final our purpose in this research is to contribute to developing of assistive robot and related-apparatus. In terms of developing a new system, we thought that it is important to examine behaviors as well as spatial recognition. Therefore, experiments have been performed for an examination of human spatial perceptions, especially right and left recognition, during car driving by using NIRS. In previous research, it has been documented that there were significant differences at dorsolateral prefrontal cortex at left hemisphere during virtual driving task and actual driving. In this paper, we performed measuring the brain activity during car driving by using NIRS. And we performed statistical analysis of the brain activity. The purpose of this paper is discovering the brain region which was involved in decision making when human drive a car and considering between human movement and brain activity during car driving. Keywords—brain information processing during driving task; spatial cognitive task; determining direction; NIRS