Nowadays, there is a growing attention towards quality of life within our cities: air pollution, traffic congestion and road safety are undoubtedly among the main concerns of such topic. NEUROSIM project aims at validating and promoting the employment of car simulators at driving schools, thus directly dealing with road safety, but also tackling at different levels all the previous concerns.
Thanks to the recent technological progress, driven by the great interest and appeal raised by Virtual Realities, simulators are becoming more and more realistic. Not surprisingly, their employment has been promoted across different domains, such as aviation, maritime and military domains such as in different applications of medicine. The benefits of employing simulators with training purposes are scientifically wide accepted, in particular because of their proneness to reproduce critical and unsafe situations, at the same time reducing costs and increasing (ideally infinite times) the replicability of the targeted situations. For example, aircraft pilots training is mostly performed at simulators.
Nevertheless, in automotive simulators are largely used only for research, mainly focused on investigating driving behavior and mental impairments (e.g. drowsiness). Instead, their use in drivers¿ education is still unexplored. Therefore, the NEUROSIM would face an open issue within the scientific community and the society in general. The validation of simulators employment in drivers¿ education would imply several benefits: less environmental pollution, higher safety levels, less impact on urban traffic, higher cost-effectiveness for driving schools. The project impact would be ground-breaking. In addition, NEUROSIM project aims at employing forefront techniques including the multimodal use of neurophysiological measures, since they allow to obtain objective information of human mental states, thus providing a way to understand the reasons of specific behaviors and correct them.
Thanks to the recent technological progress, driven by the great interest and appeal raised by Virtual Realities, simulators are becoming more and more realistic. Not surprisingly, their employment has been promoted across different domains, firstly in aviation [1], but also in maritime domain [2], military domain [3] and in different applications of medical service, such as laparoscopic and orthopaedic surgery [4]. The benefits of employing simulators with training purposes are scientifically wide accepted, in particular because of their proneness to reproduce critical and unsafe situations, at the same time reducing the costs and increasing (ideally infinite times) the task repeatability [5].
In automotive domain, the use of simulators is widespread but only for research purposes, mainly focused on investigating driving behaviour and mental impairments, such as fatigue and drowsiness. However, their use in drivers¿ education is still unexplored, although there is the perception of the related potential benefits [6]. A preliminary US study with 500 novice drivers proved that using a simulator in the learning process significantly reduces the number of accidents for young drivers [7].
Therefore, in this context NEUROSIM project would face an open issue within the scientific community and the society in general. Strengthening the education and training of road users has been one of the main
topics of the `Road Safety Programme 2011-2020¿ of the European Commission and of the `Global Plan for the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020¿ of the United Nations General Assembly [8].
The integration of simulators use in drivers¿ education would imply several benefits at different levels: less environmental pollution, higher safety levels, less impact on urban traffic, higher cost-effectiveness for driving schools as well as for customers. The project impact would be ground-breaking.
Not surprisingly, the European Driving Schools Association (EFA-EU) recently became advisory board member of the EU project ¿ViDriS ¿ Virtual Driving School¿ aimed at developing high fidelity driving simulators to be employed during driving education [9]. Therefore the field appears very fertile, however there is still the lack of a solid methodology able to validate in a comprehensive way (by considering performance, subjective measures and cognitive evidences) such use of simulators as well as to provide guidelines regarding the proper integration of this innovative technology with existent education protocols.
NEUROSIM project will fill this gap, by employing very forefront techniques including the use of neurophysiological measures. Their advantages are very clear, as already demonstrated also during my previous research [10-11], since they allow to obtain objective information of human mental states, thus providing not only a different perspective on the human behaviour but also a way to understand its hidden reasons.
In addition, NEUROSIM project will also pave the way for the employment of simulators in design and ergonomic research: ideally, by ¿quantifying¿ the bias between real and simulated driving, it would be possible to employ simulators also to test the impact of innovative Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and other facilities to support the driver. Finally, NEUROSIM would provide tangible results supporting the use of simulators also in different applications, definitely validating their benefits.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.Lee, Alfred T. Flight simulation: virtual environments in aviation. Routledge, 2017.
2.Sellberg, C. et al. "Learning to navigate: the centrality of instructions and assessments for developing students¿ professional competencies in simulator-based training." WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs 17.2 (2018): 249-265.
3.Rech, M. et al. "Geography, military geography, and critical military studies." Critical Military Studies 1.1 (2015): 47-60.
4.Vaughan, N. et al. "A review of virtual reality based training simulators for orthopaedic surgery." Medical engineering & physics 38.2 (2016): 59-71.
5.Farmer, E. et al. Handbook of simulator-based training. Routledge, 2017.
6.Sætren, G. et al. Simulator training in driver education - potential gains and weaknessess. European Safety and Reliability Association (ESRA), 2018.
7.Allen, R. Wade, et al. "The effect of driving simulator fidelity on training effectiveness." DSC 2007 North America (2007).
8.https://www.who.int/roadsafety/decade_of_action/plan/english_global_plan....
9.https://www.efa-eu.com/efa-becomes-advisory-board-member-of-eu-project/.
10.Di Flumeri, G. et al. "EEG-based mental workload neurometric to evaluate the impact of different traffic and road conditions in real driving settings." Frontiers in human neuroscience 12 (2018): 509.
11.Di Flumeri, G. et al. "EEG-Based Workload Index as a Taxonomic Tool to Evaluate the Similarity of Different Robot-Assisted Surgery Systems." International Symposium on Human Mental Workload. Springer, Cham, 2019.