Are mobile in-car communication systems feasible?: a usability study

The issue of driver distraction remains critical despite efforts that aim to reduce its effects. In-Car Communication Systems (ICCS) were introduced to address visual and manual distraction occurring when using a mobile phone whilst driving. ICCS running on mobile phone have increased the number of people using ICCS as they can be installed at no cost and the quality of speech recognition on mobile devices is improving. Little research, however, has been conducted to investigate usability problems with mobile ICCS. This paper proposes a new model to address some of the issues found with current mobile ICCS, called the multimodal interface for mobile info-communication with context (MIMIC). This paper discusses the design and usability evaluation of a prototype mobile ICCS, designed using MIMIC. Several tasks were evaluated using different metrics including time on task, task completion, task success, number of errors, flexibility, user satisfaction and workload. Results obtained show that the users gave a good overall rating to the mobile ICCS, which indicates that users will easily accept such technology. Future work will include redesigning the speech user interface in order to address the usability issues found with the current prototype.