Augmented Affective Cognition for Usability Study of In Vehicle System User Interface

Abstract

Usability of invehicle systems has become increasingly important for ease of operations and safety of driving. The user interface (UI) of invehicle systems is a critical focus of usability study. This paper studies how to use advanced computational, physiologyand behaviorbased tools and methodologies to determine affective/emotional states and behavior of an individual in real time and in turn how to adapt the humanvehicle interaction to meet users' cognitive needs based on the realtime assessment. Specifically, we set up a set of physiological sensors that are capable of collecting EEG, facial EMG, skin conductance response, and respiration data and a set of motion sensing and tracking equipment that is capable of capturing eye ball movement and objects which the user is interacting with. All hardware components and software are integrated into an augmented sensor platform that can perform as “one coherent systemâ€‌ to enable multimodal data processing and information inference for contextaware analysis of emotional states and cognitive behavior based on the rough set inference engine. Meanwhile subjective data are also recorded for comparison. A usability study of invehicle system UI is shown to demonstrate the potential of the proposed methodology.