Menu navigation with in-vehicle technologies: Auditory menu cues improve dual task performance, preference, and workload

Auditory display research for driving has mainly examined a limited range of tasks (e.g., collision warnings, cell phone tasks). In contrast, the goal of this project was to evaluate the effectiveness of enhanced auditory menu cues in a simulated driving context. The advanced auditory cues of “spearcons” (compressed speech cues) and “spindex” (a speech-based index cue) were predicted to improve both menu navigation and driving. Two experiments used a dual task paradigm in which users selected songs on the vehicle’s infotainment system. In Experiment 1, 24 undergraduates played a simple, perceptual-motor ball-catching game (the primary task; a surrogate for driving), and navigated through an alphabetized list of 150 song titles—rendered as an auditory menu—as a secondary task. The menu was presented either in the typical visual-only manner, or enhanced with text-to-speech (TTS), or TTS plus one of three types of additional auditory cues. In Experiment 2, 34 undergraduates conducted the same secondary task while driving in a simulator. In both experiments, performance on both the primary task (success rate of the game or driving performance) and the secondary task (menu search time) was better with the auditory menus than with no sound. Perceived workload scores as well as user preferences favored the enhanced auditory cue types. These results show that adding audio, and enhanced auditory cues in particular, can allow a driver to operate the menus of in-vehicle technologies more efficiently while driving more safely. Results are discussed with multiple resources theory

Indigenous Australian household structure: a simple data collection tool and implications for close contact transmission of communicable diseases

Households are an important location for the transmission of communicable diseases. Social contact between household members is typically more frequent, of greater intensity, and is more likely to involve people of different age groups than contact occurring in the general community. Understanding household structure in different populations is therefore fundamental to explaining patterns of disease transmission in these populations. Indigenous populations in Australia tend to live in larger households than non-Indigenous populations, but limited data are available on the structure of these households, and how they differ between remote and urban communities. We have developed a novel approach to the collection of household structure data, suitable for use in a variety of contexts, which provides a detailed view of age, gender, and room occupancy patterns in remote and urban Australian Indigenous households. Here we report analysis of data collected using this tool, which quantifies the extent of crowding in Indigenous households, particularly in remote areas. We use these data to generate matrices of age-specific contact rates, as used by mathematical models of infectious disease transmission. To demonstrate the impact of household structure, we use a mathematical model to simulate an influenza-like illness in different populations. Our simulations suggest that outbreaks in remote populations are likely to spread more rapidly and to a greater extent than outbreaks in non-Indigenous populations