Emotional driving in AI-powered Cars; Driver and traffic safety. Emotion tracking and route prediction, alongside rewarding and education for good driving behaviour.

Abstract

Every year, individuals lose their life in traffic accidents triggered by human errors. The automotive industry intends to create autonomous driving to fix this issue by getting rid of the greatest safety issue, the driver himself. But in this area, the industry faces major problems with law regulations and technological difficulties. In collaboration with Volvo cars and Volvo’s vision, that no one should be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo by 2020. This dissertation investigates how human errors created by emotional driving or bad driving styles can be minimized with the help of artificial intelligence assistance’s instead of using fully autonomous driving vehicles. Along Volvo Car’s design strategy including safety, intelligent, modern and warmth, a concept has been created in which cars can detect human emotions. For this purpose, methodology was conducted in a design thinking structure and various literature sources were reviewed, expert interviews were conducted at Volvo Cars with data analytics specialist and consumer researcher, as well as a psychologist focusing on behavioral therapy. Within the design methodology, such as problem statement and brainstorming, a variety of ideas were created, focusing on angry driving in traffic. The outcome of the thesis includes an investigation into safety-critical emotions in traffic and a design concept that minimizes critical errors created by angry driving and bad driving style. The design concept has been tested iteratively with formative usability evaluation and summative usability evaluation in support with lo-fi and hi-fi prototyping on smartphones and tablets. The design concept in its final state, called Volvo Intuit, has three features such as "prevention" that takes care of planning a route to a destination in a trouble-free manner with the support of an AI and an emotional traffic heat map, "education" that includes the approach of educating users in good driving style, and "motivation" that rewards the user for good driving style. As discovered from research, when negative emotions (such as anger or sadness) occur, they are difficult to eliminate and can result in an emotional increase if handled incorrectly. Consequently, the author recommends that preventive and reactive strategies should be implemented if driving with emotions occurs in traffic to avoid errors and misbehaviour.