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Save Your Life

- A Context-aware System that Saves Your Life

September-December, 2013

Save Your Life (SYL) is an context-aware system that prevents texting while driving behavior among young adults. The challenge of this project was to to find a real-world human factors problem and design a way to solve it.

 

This is the final project of Human Factors at CMU.

Teammates: Kirsten Yee and A Tugrul Yuksel

My Roles: UX Researcher + Interaction Designer

Contributions: UX research | Interaction design | All storyboards Process: Task Analysis | Survey | System Redesign

Research Findings

Texting while driving, which causes thousands of automobile fatalities annually, is most prevalent among young adults.

 

Sending or receiving a text takes a driver's eyes from the road for an average of 4.6 seconds, the equivalent of driving the length of an entire football field at 55 mph, blind.

 

User Study

We sent out questionnaires and got 55 responses in total. 

We also supplemented our user study with external research to better understand how and why users engage in texting while driving. 

 

We found that people are aware of the dangers of texting while driving and don’t want to risk others’ lives by doing so. 

Nearly 90% (N=47) of respondents agreed that texting while driving interferes with their driving abilities”.

 

These data show the limits of divided attention: people don’t think they can simultaneously perform both activities safely.

Task Analysis

We conducted a task analysis to understand what drivers actually do to achieve their goal of texting while driving, and to see how drivers are influenced by the mobile environment.

 

We found that texting while driving is especially dangerous because it involves visual, manual and cognitive distraction

 

Different from existing mobile signal jammer, our design focuses on context-awareness and only jams the signal when it senses danger.
 

 

Our Design

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