Design of Simulated Takeover Request Task

As the population of older adults is increasing worldwide, it is imperative to accommodate their mobility and hence independence needs in the design of our transport systems. Semi-autonomous vehicles theoretically provide a potential solution to the mobility needs of older adults by supporting them in their driving. However, the technology is not fully matured yet and it still poses issues such as the paradigm of takeover request. This particular scenario may very well cause more problems than it solves. The major issue is that we don’t know how a person above 60 years of age may respond to a Takeover request and whether it could potentially be a very error-prone situation for any driver, especially the ones in the older age groups. In this study, we are developing a task that mimics the fundamentals of the Takeover request scenario and that is based on executive functions of the brain. Thus, it could help in predicting performance in a semi-autonomous vehicle with the idea of verifying what are the key processes leading to error and/or good performance and whether there may be specific preconditions to be checked for takeover requests to be more likely to succeed.