The Hidden Risks of Touchscreens Behind the Wheel
As touchscreens take over the modern cockpit, new research reveals the hidden cost of convenience behind the wheel. By simulating real driving conditions, researchers found that interacting with in-car displays can significantly impact focus, accuracy, and lane control—especially under mental strain. The findings point to a future where vehicles don’t just respond to touch, but adapt intelligently to driver attention, making in-car interfaces smarter and safer.
Transcript
00:00:01 Today, almost every car has a touchscreen put in it and we need to understand how interacting with that touchscreen affects people's driving. And so this study was a chance to investigate how cognitive load, touchscreens and driving all kind of interact with each other. Okay, let’s just do one. OK. So we have a driving simulator that was sent to us by Toyota Research Institute, TRI. We also have a touchscreen that's mounted near the field of view, just like you might have in a car.
00:00:32 And of course, steering wheel and gas and brake pedals and so on. You can start driving now. So what participants did, they would drive the car and do their best to stay in the lane that they're assigned to. But at the same time, they also would interact with a touchscreen. And in our case, the touchscreen has a series of circles on it that light up. And you have to tap those circles, and that mimics interacting with the touchscreen, but allows us to really measure the performance of a user while they're selecting those targets on the touchscreen. So this image is for the depth camera
00:01:06 for tracking the movement of the hands. For eye tracking, we use a tiny camera right in front of participants eye. We use eye tracking to follow the driver's gaze, and we can tell how much are they looking at the road versus away from the road. We can also track galvanic skin response which tells us how stressed the driver is. how stressed the driver is. Whoa! We also looked at how
00:01:33 increased cognitive load affects driving and affects touchscreen use. Nine - Eight. Zero - Nine. We had them essentially do a memory task where they had to remember a sequence of numbers and repeat those back. Like someone is talking with you and you need to memorize what he or she was talking about. And we found a number of of interesting implications of touchscreens in driving contexts. When interacting with a touchscreen drivers swerve quite a bit more from the centerline
00:02:07 of their lane. We also found that when you're driving, your ability to interact with the touchscreen is compromised. Your efficiency in selecting targets is about half of what it was if you're just sitting still and not driving. We also found that increased cognitive load means that driving and touchscreen performance gets worse. I think this research helps inform how we might improve touchscreen interfaces for drivers. For example, if the car knows that the driver is in a turn,
00:02:43 maybe it shows a different interface on the touchscreen than if the driver is stopped at a red light and has time to look at the touchscreen in a more prolonged way. Ultimately, we hope to make driving safer and enable the car actually to sense what state the user's in and improve driving for the user.