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Determining the effect of smartphone alerts and warnings on the street-crossing behavior of non-mobility-impaired older and younger adults
Conference proceeding   Open access

Determining the effect of smartphone alerts and warnings on the street-crossing behavior of non-mobility-impaired older and younger adults

Jeehan Malik, Morgan N Di Napoli Parr, Jessica Flathau, Hanxi Tang, Joseph K Kearney, Jodie M Plumert and Kyle Rector
CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System, pp.1-12
CHI '21 (Yokohama, Japan, 05/08/2021–05/13/2021)
05/07/2021
DOI: 10.1145/3411764.3445234
url
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445234View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Vehicle manufacturers and government agencies are considering using vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communication to improve pedestrian safety. However, there are unanswered questions about whether people will heed alerts and warnings presented through a smartphone. We conducted between-subject studies with younger and older adults where they physically crossed a virtual street. They received either permissive alerts (safe to cross), prohibitive warnings (not safe to cross), or no alerts or warnings (control). We found that both older and younger adults were highly likely to heed permissive alerts, even when this meant taking gaps between two vehicles that were smaller than they would typically take on their own. We also found that we could shift participants’ road-crossing behavior toward greater caution when they were only alerted to cross very large gaps between two vehicles. Participants stated that alerts and warnings were useful, but that prohibitive warnings were annoying. These findings give insights into V2P design and pedestrian behavior when smartphone assistance is provided.

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