Influences of Gesture-Based Mobile Phone Use While Driving

Abstract

The use of mobile phones while driving has been a hot topic in the field of driving safety for decades. Although there are few studies on the influence of gesture control on in-vehicle secondary tasks, this study aims to investigate the impact of gesture-based mobile phone use without touching while driving from the perspective of multiple-resource workload owing to visual, auditory, cognitive, and psychomotor resource occupation. A novel gesture control technique was adopted for secondary task interactions, to recognize the gestures of drivers. An experiment was conducted to study the influences of two interaction modes, traditional touch-based mobile phone interaction and gesture-based mobile phone interaction, on driving behavior in three different cognitive level task groups. The results indicate that gesture-based mobile phone interaction can improve driving performance with regard to lateral position-keeping ability and steering wheel control; nevertheless, it has no significant impact on longitudinal metrics such as driving speed, driving speed variation, and throttle control variation. Gesture-based mobile phone interactions have a larger effect on secondary tasks with medium cognitive load but not on actual operation tasks. It was also verified that the performance of gesture-based mobile phone interaction was better in secondary mobile phone tasks such as switching (e.g., switching songs) and adjusting (e.g., adjusting volume) than the traditional interaction mode. This study provides the theoretical and experimental support for human–computer interaction using gesture-based mobile phone interactive control in future automobiles.