Safety

Safety refers to the ability of the automotive HMI system to suppress driver distraction and enhance driving safety while the driver is performing automotive HMI tasks during driving. Unlike other HMI evaluation indexes, safety is an evaluation index that is unique to automotive HMI. This is because most frequently used tasks in automotive HMI are typically secondary tasks that users need to perform while driving without significantly impacting driving safety. In contrast, for devices such as cell phones or computers, users can usually operate them with full attention without secondary tasks; therefore, there is no need for safety evaluation. Safety plays a special role in automotive HMI system evaluation as it does not evaluate the system itself, but rather the impact of it as a set of secondary tasks on another set of primary driving tasks. The balance between secondary and primary tasks is a major challenge in the design and evaluation of automotive HMI.