Project

Emergency vehicles face risks when interacting with surrounding traffic. To support civilian driver’s move over-behavior they can be provided with an Emergency Vehicle Approaching (EVA) warning. An EVA warning is an in-car warning that lets the driver know that an emergency vehicle is approaching them about 15 seconds in advance. This allows the driver to notice the emergency vehicle earlier and thereby provides them with more time to move over in a safe manner.

VTI and University of Gothenburg will during the spring conduct a simulator experiment with 75 participants. In the experiment, the participants will be approached by an emergency vehicle two times while driving on a highway. The current simulator study will function as a preparatory study for a naturalistic study that will be conducted in a real traffic environment. To be able to examine driver behavior in the upcoming naturalistic study, eye tracking is believed to be a valuable method. Eye-tracking in combination with measurements of vehicles' speed and placement will allow for a thorough examination of the effects of EVA warnings. In previous studies, only measures of vehicle position and speed have been used as measurements of EVA’s effect. Through eye-tracking it will be possible to explore how drivers' glance behavior changes when receiving an EVA warning.