The Impact of Mental States on Semi-autonomous Driving Takeover Performance: A Systematic Review

Author(s):  
Gaojian Huang ◽  
Christine Petersen ◽  
Brandon J. Pitts

Semi-autonomous vehicles still require drivers to occasionally resume manual control. However, drivers of these vehicles may have different mental states. For example, drivers may be engaged in non-driving related tasks or may exhibit mind wandering behavior. Also, monitoring monotonous driving environments can result in passive fatigue. Given the potential for different types of mental states to negatively affect takeover performance, it will be critical to highlight how mental states affect semi-autonomous takeover. A systematic review was conducted to synthesize the literature on mental states (such as distraction, fatigue, emotion) and takeover performance. This review focuses specifically on five fatigue studies. Overall, studies were too few to observe consistent findings, but some suggest that response times to takeover alerts and post-takeover performance may be affected by fatigue. Ultimately, this review may help researchers improve and develop real-time mental states monitoring systems for a wide range of application domains.

10.29007/2n4h ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabina Alazzawi ◽  
Mathias Hummel ◽  
Pascal Kordt ◽  
Thorsten Sickenberger ◽  
Christian Wieseotte ◽  
...  

Recent technological advances in vehicle automation and connectivity have furthered the development of a wide range of innovative mobility concepts such as autonomous driving, on-demand services and electric mobility. Our study aimed at investigating the interplay of these concepts to efficiently reduce vehicle counts in urban environments, thereby reducing congestion levels and creating new public spaces to promote the quality of live in urban cities. For analysis, we implemented the aforementioned factors by introducing the concept of robo-taxis as an autonomous and shared mobility service. Using SUMO as the simulation framework, custom functionalities such as ride sharing, autonomous driving and advanced data processing were implemented as python methods via, and around, the TraCI interface. A passenger origin-destination matrix for our region of interest in Milan was derived from publically available mobile phone usage data and used for route input. Key evaluation parameters were the density-flow relationship, particulate-matter emissions, and person waiting- times. Based on these parameters, the critical transition rate from private cars to robo- taxis to reach a free-flow state was calculated. Our simulations show, that a transition rate of about 50% is required to achieve a significant reduction of traffic congestion levels in peak hours as indicated by mean travel times and vehicle flux. Assuming peak- shaving, e.g. through dynamic pricing promised by digitalization, of about 10%, the threshold transition rate drops to 30%. Based on these findings, we propose that introducing a robo-taxi fleet of 9500 vehicles, centered around mid-size 6 seaters, can solve traffic congestion and emission problems in Milan.


Author(s):  
Gaojian Huang ◽  
Nade Liang ◽  
Chuhao Wu ◽  
Brandon J. Pitts

Significant growth in the number of autonomous vehicles is expected in the coming years. With this technology, drivers will likely begin to disengage from the driving task and often experience mind wandering. Research has examined the effects of mind wandering on manual driving performance, but little work has been done to understand its impact on autonomous driving. In addition, it is unclear what physiological measurements can reveal about mind wandering in the driving context. Therefore, the goals of this paper were to (a) understand how mind wandering affects warning signal detection, semi-autonomous driving performance, and physiological responses, and (b) develop a model to predict mind wandering. Preliminary findings suggest that mind wandering may be observed as a result of road familiarity, and that the number of driving years and response times to alerts may be suitable predictors of mind wandering. This work is expected to help inform the design of future autonomous vehicles to prevent distracted driving behaviors.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Mosolova ◽  
Dmitry Sosin ◽  
Sergey Mosolov

During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers (HCWs) have been subject to increased workload while also exposed to many psychosocial stressors. In a systematic review we analyze the impact that the pandemic has had on HCWs mental state and associated risk factors. Most studies reported high levels of depression and anxiety among HCWs worldwide, however, due to a wide range of assessment tools, cut-off scores, and number of frontline participants in the studies, results were difficult to compare. Our study is based on two online surveys of 2195 HCWs from different regions of Russia during spring and autumn epidemic outbreaks revealed the rates of anxiety, stress, depression, emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and perceived stress as 32.3%, 31.1%, 45.5%, 74.2%, 37.7% ,67.8%, respectively. Moreover, 2.4% of HCWs reported suicidal thoughts. The most common risk factors include: female gender, nurse as an occupation, younger age, working for over 6 months, chronic diseases, smoking, high working demands, lack of personal protective equipment, low salary, lack of social support, isolation from families, the fear of relatives getting infected. These results demonstrate the need for urgent supportive programs for HCWs fighting COVID-19 that fall into higher risk factors groups.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Morgado Areia ◽  
Christopher Biggs ◽  
Mauro Santos ◽  
Neal Thurley ◽  
Stephen Gerry ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: Timely recognition of the deteriorating inpatient remains challenging. Ambulatory monitoring systems (AMS) may augment current monitoring practices. However, there are many challenges to implementation in the hospital environment, and evidence describing the clinical impact of AMS on deterioration detection and patient outcome remains unclear. Objective: To assess the impact of vital signs monitoring on detection of deterioration and related clinical outcomes in hospitalised patients using ambulatory monitoring systems, in comparison with standard care.Methods: A systematic search was conducted in August 2020 using MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, CENTRAL and Health Technology Assessment databases, as well as grey literature. Studies comparing the use of AMS against standard care for deterioration detection and related clinical outcomes in hospitalised patients were included. Deterioration related outcomes (primary) included unplanned intensive care admissions, rapid response team or cardiac arrest activation, total and major complications rate. Other clinical outcomes (secondary) included in-hospital mortality and hospital length of stay. Exploratory outcomes included alerting system parameters and clinical trial registry information. Results: Of 8706 citations, 10 studies with different designs met the inclusion criteria, of which 7 were included in the meta-analyses. Overall study quality was moderate. The meta-analysis indicated that the AMS, when compared with standard care, was associated with a reduction in intensive care transfers (risk ratio, RR, 0.87; 95% confidence interval, CI, 0.66 to 1.15), rapid response or cardiac arrest team activation (RR, 0.84; 95% CI 0.69 to 1.01), total (RR, 0.77; 95% CI 0.44 to 1.32) and major (RR, 0.55; 95% CI 0.24 to 1.30) complications prevalence. There was also association with reduced mortality (RR, 0.48; 95% CI 0.18 to 1.29) and hospital length of stay (mean difference, MD, -0.09; 95% CI -0.43 to 0.44). However, none were statistically significant.Conclusion: This systematic review indicates that implementation of AMS may have a positive impact on early deterioration detection and associated clinical outcomes, but differing design/quality of available studies and diversity of outcomes measures limits a definite conclusion. Our narrative findings suggested that alarms should be adjusted to minimise false alerts and promote rapid clinical action in response to deterioration.PROSPERO Registration number: CRD42020188633


Author(s):  
Vanita Jaitly ◽  
Shilpa Sharma ◽  
Linesh Raja

The word “smart” is quite commonly associated with different types of products of IoT sensors and its contemporary technology. The frequent progress in the contemporary technology includes convention and the progressive integration of microprocessor. This gives the smart sensors application to a wide range of applications. Smart sensors when associated with agriculture are known as smart agriculture. With the help of smart sensors, technology of internet of things has helped agriculture in facilitating its efficiency, which further helps in decreasing the impact of environment on the production of the crops and deprecate the expenses. This is done by a few methods like calculating the condition of the environment, which affects the production of the crops, keeping a check on the cattle health and indicating when some problem occurs. The author discussed about sensors, their nature and evolution, generations of smarts sensors, and how they became better with the course of time in terms of smart agriculture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominik Havsteen-Franklin ◽  
Megan Tjasink ◽  
Jacqueline Winter Kottler ◽  
Claire Grant ◽  
Veena Kumari

Crisis events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can have a devastating effect on communities and the care professionals within them. Over recent years, arts-based interventions have helped in a wide range of crisis situations, being recommended to support the workforce during and after complex crisis but there has been no systematic review of the role of arts-based crisis interventions and whether there are cogent themes regarding practice elements and outcomes. We, therefore, conducted a systematic review to (i) define the arts-based change process used during and after crisis events, and (ii) explore the perceptions of intermediate and long-term mental health benefits of arts-based interventions for professionals in caring roles. Our search yielded six studies (all qualitative). All data were thematically aggregated and meta-synthesized, revealing seven practice elements (a safe place, focusing on strengths and protective factors, developing psychosocial competencies to support peers, emotional expression and processing, identifying and naming the impact of the crisis, using an integrative creative approach, and cultural and organizational sensitivity) applied across all six studies, as well as a range of intermediate and long-term benefits shared common features (adapting, growing, and recovering; using the community as a healing resource; reducing or preventing symptoms of stress or trauma reactions, psychophysiological homeostasis). The ways in which these studies were designed independently from one another and yet used the same practice elements in their crisis interventions indicates that there is comparability about how and why the arts-based practice elements are being used and to what effect. Our findings provide a sound basis and meaningful parameters for future research incorporating quantitative and qualitative approaches to firmly establish the effectiveness of art-based interventions, and how arts can support cultural sensitivity, acceptability and indicated outcomes, particularly those relating to stress and trauma during or following a crisis.


Author(s):  
Gaojian Huang ◽  
Clayton Steele ◽  
Xinrui Zhang ◽  
Brandon J. Pitts

The rapid growth of autonomous vehicles is expected to improve roadway safety. However, certain levels of vehicle automation will still require drivers to ‘takeover’ during abnormal situations, which may lead to breakdowns in driver-vehicle interactions. To date, there is no agreement on how to best support drivers in accomplishing a takeover task. Therefore, the goal of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of multimodal alerts as a feasible approach. In particular, we examined the effects of uni-, bi-, and trimodal combinations of visual, auditory, and tactile cues on response times to takeover alerts. Sixteen participants were asked to detect 7 multimodal signals (i.e., visual, auditory, tactile, visual-auditory, visual-tactile, auditory-tactile, and visual-auditory-tactile) while driving under two conditions: with SAE Level 3 automation only or with SAE Level 3 automation in addition to performing a road sign detection task. Performance on the signal and road sign detection tasks, pupil size, and perceived workload were measured. Findings indicate that trimodal combinations result in the shortest response time. Also, response times were longer and perceived workload was higher when participants were engaged in a secondary task. Findings may contribute to the development of theory regarding the design of takeover request alert systems within (semi) autonomous vehicles.


BMJ Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. e029789 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Louise Hutchinson ◽  
Angela Berndt ◽  
Deborah Forsythe ◽  
Susan Gilbert-Hunt ◽  
Stacey George ◽  
...  

ObjectivesTo identify how social return on investment (SROI) analysis—traditionally used by business consultants—has been interpreted, used and innovated by academics in the health and social care sector and to assess the quality of peer-reviewed SROI studies in this sector.DesignSystematic review.SettingsCommunity and residential settings.ParticipantsA wide range of demographic groups and age groups.ResultsThe following databases were searched: Web of Science, Scopus, CINAHL, Econlit, Medline, PsychINFO, Embase, Emerald, Social Care Online and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Limited uptake of SROI methodology by academics was found in the health and social care sector. From 868 papers screened, 8 studies met the criteria for inclusion in this systematic review. Study quality was found to be highly variable, ranging from 38% to 90% based on scores from a purpose-designed quality assessment tool. In general, relatively high consistency and clarity was observed in the reporting of the research question, reasons for using this methodology and justifying the need for the study. However, weaknesses were observed in other areas including justifying stakeholders, reporting sample sizes, undertaking sensitivity analysis and reporting unexpected or negative outcomes. Most papers cited links to additional materials to aid in reporting. There was little evidence that academics had innovated or advanced the methodology beyond that outlined in a much-cited SROI guide.ConclusionAcademics have thus far been slow to adopt SROI methodology in the evaluation of health and social care interventions, and there is little evidence of innovation and development of the methodology. The word count requirements of peer-reviewed journals may make it difficult for authors to be fully transparent about the details of their studies, potentially impacting the quality of reporting in those studies published in these journals.PROSPERO registration numberCRD42018080195.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Soukaina Bahsoun ◽  
Karen Coopman ◽  
Elizabeth C. Akam

AbstractMesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) represent an invaluable asset for the field of cell therapy. Human Bone marrow-derived MSCs (hBM-MSCs) are one of the most commonly used cell types in clinical trials. They are currently being studied and tested for the treatment of a wide range of diseases and conditions. The future availability of MSCs therapies to the public will require a robust and reliable delivery process. Cryopreservation represents the gold standard in cell storage and transportation, but its effect on BM-MSCs is still not well established. A systematic review was conducted to evaluate the impact of cryopreservation on BM-MSCs and to attempt to uncover the reasons behind some of the controversial results reported in the literature. Forty-one in vitro studies were analysed, and their results organised according to the cell attributes they assess. It was concluded that cryopreservation does not affect BM-MSCs morphology, surface marker expression, differentiation or proliferation potential. However, mixed results exist regarding the effect on colony forming ability and the effects on viability, attachment and migration, genomic stability and paracrine function are undefined mainly due to the huge variabilities governing the cryopreservation process as a whole and to the lack of standardised assays.


Author(s):  
Anshuman Sharma ◽  
Zuduo Zheng ◽  
Jiwon Kim ◽  
Ashish Bhaskar ◽  
Md. Mazharul Haque

Response time (RT) is a critical human factor that influences traffic flow characteristics and traffic safety, and is governed by drivers’ decision-making behavior. Unlike the traditional environment (TE), the connected environment (CE) provides information assistance to drivers. This in-vehicle informed environment can influence drivers’ decision-making and thereby their RTs. Therefore, to ascertain the impact of CE on RT, this study develops RT estimation methodologies for TE (RTEM-TE) and CE (RTEM-CE), using vehicle trajectory data. Because of the intra-lingual inconsistency among traffic engineers, modelers, and psychologists in the usage of the term RT, this study also provides a ubiquitous definition of RT that can be used in a wide range of applications. Both RTEM-TE and RTEM-CE are built on the fundamental stimulus–response relationship, and they utilize the wavelet-based energy distribution of time series of speeds to detect the stimulus–response points. These methodologies are rigorously examined for their efficiency and accuracy using noise-free and noisy synthetic data, and driving simulator data. Analysis results demonstrate the excellent performance of both the methodologies. Moreover, the analysis shows that the mean RT in CE is longer than the mean RT in TE.


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