Ricerc@Sapienza

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.