Today is the world’s emoji day but… What is the relationship between emojis and ADAS&ME project? Future drivers will be able to get a feedback on their current mental and physical state while driving and while being driven.  A simple, efficient and subtle way to do this is by the use of Emojis that people understand and use in their daily life on their smartphones.  With such feedback, the drivers and riders will be more aware of their state and will be able to take preventive measures. This is a small part of our multimodal HMI strategy for efficient driver-vehicle interactions to avoid critical scenarios.

The ADAS&ME WP4 Team, responsible for sensors and algorithms, finalized the driver states and their severity levels.  This formed the input for the emoji design.  The challenge was to represent the driver states as clearly as possible and give an intuitive and conspicuous feedback at a glance.  The design direction and the color themes were kept simple and minimalistic. This approach helped us achieve an apt representation of the current state of the driver.

It was also important that the features on the Emojis were large enough, since on integration in the HMI, the expressions must be clearly distinguishable.  This was done by an iterative development process in WP4 + WP5 cooperation. In case no Driver/Rider state detection, the Emoji will fade out and the ADAS&ME logo will be visible.

The effectiveness shall be further improved by appending acoustic feedback in form of audio Hybricons, based on a severity component accompanied by a speech message.  The emoticons would then eventually graduate to become audio-visual Hybricons!

Hence, be ready to smile at your car, because it will smile back at you!

Please, see in the link, further information about the ADAS&ME use cases.