Multimodal Automotive Telematics Systems: Design and Evaluation

The definition of Automotive (or Vehicular) Telematics Systems (VTS) is a challenging task. Traditional HCI/Software Engineering approaches and methodologies cannot be totally applied, due to the number of issues inducted by the automotive domain, such as safety concerns, hardware constraints, modular architectures, etc… In this dissertation we deal with the design of both the User Interface (UI), and the software architecture design, the development and the evaluation tasks of an Automotive Telematics Systems. About the UI, our aim was to define a novel approach meant to synergistically integrate visual, auditory, and tactile information, in order to limit driver’s cognitive and visual workload inducted by VTS. As a result, we propose a new interaction device, named Handy and currently patent pending. Thanks to its specific shape and positioning, driver has always within reach all the commands needed to interact with the VTS, and could rely only on his/her tactile channel to identify the suited controls, with a significant improvement of the overall safety, as reported by experimental trials we conducted. Handy is supported by a specifically conceived Graphical User Interface (GUI), which also exhibits several distinguishing features. Indeed, it is meant to minimize the driver’s visual workload, by carefully calibrating the appropriate amount of information to display. The GUI is complemented by a Vocal User Interface (VUI), to obtain, together with Handy, an integrated, multimodal interface. The VUI is based on the command word paradigm and encompasses a new atomic dialogue paradigm, based on earcons and a help-on-demand mechanism. The defined auditory interface turns out to be smart for expert users, but also effective for unskilled people. Empirical results about its effectiveness were very satisfactory. About software architecture, the experience gained from designing and developing a prototype of VTS allowed us to define a new design pattern, useful to obtain flexible and modular architectures. It is intended as an evolution of the Model-View-Controller pattern and has been conceived taking into account aspects, such as concurrency, asynchronous communication, multimodality, and management of divergent services. Among the main advantages inducted by such a pattern there is an higher degree of modularity, enhancements in maintainability, extensibility and testability, and the decoupling between the UI of a subsystem and its underlying logic implementations. About the evaluation of VTS UI, it requires different approaches than assessment of traditional UIs, because, it is necessary not only to consider the user interaction with the interface but also to understand the effects of this interaction on driver-vehicle performances. Thus, it requires the user is focused on the primary driving task, and concurrently interact with the system. To this aim, we propose a new a framework specifically suited for indoor evaluation of VTSs UI. Such a framework allowed us to run empirical analysis on a sample of end-users, to assess the effectiveness of the proposed multimodal UI, in terms of driver-vehicle performances. The results gathered on a sample of eight subjects were very encouraging, since they report lower driver’s workload, than other concurrent automotive solutions.