Evaluation of Mental Workload and Stress While Driving with and without Steering Aids in a Virtual City Scenario

For people with disability, driving is an essential ability to maintain autonomy. However, assessing whether people with disability can drive safely on-road is not trivial, as it requires specifically adapted vehicles. Thus, it is often impossible to assess how much prolonged driving affects cognitive abilities and induces stress in presence of assistive aids and other road occupants. This work aimed at preliminarily assessing the sensitivity of physiological and subjective metrics in discriminating different driving conditions (i.e., steering wheel vs. driving aid), in terms of mental workload and stress, while driving on a simulator. Thirteen healthy young adults drove in a simulated environment for 10 minutes in each condition. We collected electroencephalography (EEG), heart rate variability (HRV), and electrodermal activity (EDA) data and extracted mental workload and stress-related outcomes. We administered NASA-TLX and SAM questionnaires after each condition. Both the virtual driving tasks induced measurable physiological responses. Mental work-load, cardiovascular response, and some EDA metrics increased with respect to the rest phase. The subjective measures showed a tendency toward an increase when using the driving aid, but differences were not significant. The current setup was thus able to capture the increased load and arousal during virtual driving. The lack of differences between the conditions may be due to the ease of use of the aid, which did not imply many changes to standard driving actions. In the future, it would be valuable to expand the study including additional assistive aids and enrolling individuals with disabilities.