Sharing Control with Elderly Drivers: Haptic Guidance during Curve Negotiation

Elderly drivers suffer from deterioration of sight and hearing. This makes visual and auditory information for driver support during curve negotiation not very suitable. We present the design and experimental evaluation of a haptic guidance system for curve negotiation. Twelve elderly (>50 years) subjects participated in a fixed-base driving experiment. Based on previous experience with haptic guidance systems, we hypothesized that the benefits of the haptic guidance would be a small increase of curve negotiation performance with less control activity. Results of the experiment show that this was indeed achieved. However, the haptic guidance system resulted in a relatively large increase in steering forces, which could also be a disadvantage for elderly drivers. This needs to be investigated in the future.