Car technology: Vibrating seatbelts, imaginary car horns and citrus scents will soon be important safety devices for drivers, the BA Festival of Science was told yesterday.
These multi-sensory warning systems could reduce front-to-rear collisions by as much as 10 to 15 per cent, the festival heard.
Front-to-rear collisions make up around one-quarter of all collisions, according to Dr Charles Spence, from the University of Oxford. "Driver inattention is implicated" in many of these events, he said.
Multisensory signals, occurring within close proximity of a person, could prime the defensive/avoidance circuits in a driver's brain, explained Dr Spence. These could promote rapid and intuitive behavioural responses to avoid an impending accident, he said.
It has been predicted that within 15 years, all cars will have vibro-tactile warning systems, said Dr Spence. These would use a combination of senses, such as touch, hearing and sight, to alert drivers to possible dangers
Non-visual signals are inherently more alerting than visual stimuli, and are not dependent on the current direction of a driver's gaze, said Dr Spence. People can also respond more rapidly to auditory and tactile signals than to visual signals, he continues.
In addition, brain studies over a number of years have shown how the senses are interconnected, he said. These suggest that multisensory signals, that stimulate more than one sense at the same time, may be more effective than one-sensory signals.
Currently, technology exists that uses vibrating seats to warn drivers if they are drifting into another lane.
However, Dr Spence believes that these "intelligent transport systems" could be optimised to not only grab attention, but also to elicit an appropriate behavioural response.
"The presentation of tactile cues via the steering wheel can facilitate the driver turning the steering wheel in a particular direction," said Dr Spence.
Similarly, an auditory cue, such as the sound of a car horn, could be projected as coming from a particular place in order to attract attention in that direction.
"The car would have inbuilt radar that would detect if you were getting too close to the car in front," he explained.
"It could then vibrate the seatbelt to attract attention, project a horn as though coming from the car in front, and vibrate the footpedal to make your foot jump off the accelerator." However, it is important to avoid false alarms, Dr Spence explained.
"Alarms that give rise to too many false alarms are likely to be perceived as a nuisance," he said.
"Some interface operators even go so far as to try and disable alarm signals that they consider to be too distracting or aversive." The warning signals would, therefore, only be triggered if the car came within a second or so of collision, said Dr Spence.
Dr Vikki Burns is a research scientist at The University of Birmingham and is on placement at The Irish Times as a Media Fellow for the British Association for the Advancement of Science.