Sachi Mizobuchi, Toyota InfoTechnology Center (TITC): Evaluating HMI for in-car Systems: Does Core Device Usability Predict Safety and Performance?

Sachi Mizobuchi is a research scientist at the Toyota InfoTechnology Center Co., Ltd. (TITC) in Japan. (TITC's web site http://www.toyota-itc.com/en/index.html)

TITC is a research institute that conducts research on information technology for future mobility. Their research areas covers Networks, Software Platforms, Intelligent Information Processing and New Technologies (including both hardware and software). Their mission is to bridge the gap between technological innovations and user needs. Consequently, they do advanced technologies exploration, prospectivity analysis, usability and feasibility evaluation. They also develop concepts and prototype for future technology/services.

Sachi works on the Human Machine Interaction(HMI) project in the New Technologies Research team. Her academic background is in psychology, and she has been working in the field of user experience, usability and human computer interaction in the IT industry.

She is going to introduce the scope and activity of TITC briefly, and will give a talk on her recent research of evaluating in-car HMI systems under the title of "Evaluating HMI for in-car Systems: Does Core Device Usability Predict Safety and Performance?"

ABSTRACT Since there are many different types of user and context, evaluating the usability and safety of devices and interfaces used while performing a task like driving is challenging. Can rated usability of a device in single-task use (core usability) predict its safety and performance in multi-tasking contexts, at least as a first approximation? The research study reported in this paper examined this issue by evaluating three different HMI (human-machine interaction) devices for in-car systems. An experiment was conducted in which 31 people performed a menu-selection task with the three devices. Device usability was assessed both with and without an accompanying simulated driving task. The results indicated that one of the devices was clearly worse than the other two with respect to its usability in a single task setting, and that device was also found to be more distracting while driving. This result was confirmed in the driving context by a number of different measures including usability, safety, eye gaze, and steering. In addition, direction of eye gaze and steering stability were found to be useful and unobtrusive measure for evaluating the usability and safety of the HMI interfaces. It is concluded that single-task ratings of usability may be a useful predictor of the safety and efficiency of HMI devices in vehicles for some contexts.

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Rikard Harr