Evaluation of Driver Distractions by Model-Based Approach : Effect of Visual Distractions

Drivers become distracted when they pay attention to provided in-vehicle information while driving cars. This paper proposes a model-based approach to evaluate such driver distractions caused by subtasks. First, our method identifies steering by the driver and pursuit eye movement characteristics as a driver model from experiment data without any subtasks. After that, the output measured with subtasks is compared with the model output, and makes it possible to detect the influence of distractions on human driver characteristics. This study involved experiments on tracking tasks accompanying some visual subtasks and experimentally confirmed the possibility of quantitatively evaluating driver distractions using the proposed method. Keywords: Driver distraction;