Emotion on the Road—Necessity, Acceptance, and Feasibility of Affective Computing in the Car

Besides reduction of energy consumption, which implies alternate actuation and light construction, the main research domain inautomobile development in the near future is dominated by driver assistance and natural driver-car communication. The abilityof a car to understand natural speech and provide a human-like driver assistance system can be expected to be a factor decisivefor market success on par with automatic driving systems. Emotional factors and affective states are thereby crucial for enhancedsafety and comfort. This paper gives an extensive literature overview on work related to influence of emotions on driving safety andcomfort, automatic recognition, control of emotions, and improvement of in-car interfaces by affect sensitive technology. Varioususe-case scenarios are outlined as possible applications for emotion-oriented technology in the vehicle. The possible acceptanceof such future technology by drivers is assessed in a Wizard-Of-Oz us er study, and feasibility of automatically recognising variousdriver states is demonstrated by an example system for monitoring driver attentiveness. Thereby an accuracy of 91.3% is reportedfor classifying in real-time whether the driver is attentive or distracted.