Abstract
As the population is growing, thanks to among others advancing medical services, the share of older adults increases as well. Mobility is an important aspect for the elderly to maintain a social, healthy and comfortable lifestyle. However, the physical and cognitive implications of the ageing process can negatively affect their driving performance and generally they become less fit to drive. This could result in an increased risk in (fatal) traffic accidents and thus countermeasures targeting on disabled people and elderly will become increasingly important in the near future.
With the Fontys Automotive Research Group as coordinator, a consortium of industrial companies contributes to a two year lasting project, each taking participating or reviewing roles. The project aims to develop three Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) to intercept mentioned limitations of this fast growing target group and thus aid to secure traffic safety in general:
- Smart Parking: focusses on reservation and blocking of as well as navigation to a parking place for disabled people. Taking into account the specific criteria of the user group that the functioning of the system must be robust and not complicated.,
- Smart Vision: focuses on older drivers with functional age limitations such as diminished eyesight, reduced flexibility of the torso and neck and lower mental acuity and mental information processing speed. These were counteracted by a vision based warning system for the dangerous truncation of vulnerable cyclists or pedestrians when taking a right turn in city traffic. However the system can also be applied for left turns to foresee overtaking vehicles during the prelude of the turning.
- Smart Workload: focuses on the driver task regarding the level of acceptable workload and mental limitations of the targeted user group. The driver alertness application will deliver early detection of driver fatigue and warn when the actual limits are reached.
Next to these three ADAS an enabler is developed. The measuring kit, which has two overall requirements:
1. Measuring data and visualizing these in real time,
2. Logging time-synchronized data, allowing offline analyses.
The parking system is validated using two parking spots, the smart vision system will be validated with Field Operating Test (FOTs) using different Carlabs (pre-equipped passenger cars used as driving laboratories) and finally the driver alertness system is validated using tests in a driving simulator (a car body on a moving base interacting with a virtual world visualized on a half round screen in front of the car body). It’s used for the subjective evaluation with 70 test persons. The driving simulator is also used for the validation of a computer model integrating a vehicle model and a driver model. A final validation of the driver alertness warning system demonstrator will use a Carlab and is planned for the second half of 2014.
KEYWORDS – ADAS, disabled people, elderly people, traffic safety, HMI