The car is essential for independent living in many parts of the world. It provides the means for freedom of movement and mobility. There is however overwhelming evidence suggesting that older adult drivers, may have more difficulty in attending to the driving task, especially when required to make complex decisions. The aging process negatively affects many of the perceptual, cognitive and motor skills necessary for safe driving. Previous studies show that alerting young drivers to hazards in the road results in a more cautious and safer driving. We want to confirm the same positive effects as seen for younger drivers, i.e. allocating more attention to the driving task and therefore safer driving using the same kind of speech based in-car information system. To investigate the impact of speech based in-car system for older adult drivers we setup driving simulator experiments, where we investigate different types of speech based in-car information systems with varying properties such as content of information and voice characteristics.
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