In January 2022, Chao Wang presented her recent research on the effect of indoor environment on driving performance in the conference Health Buildings 2021—America.
The team from Building Occupants Signal Synthesis Lab in Worcester Polytechnic Institute had a hierarchical assessment method to investigate driving performance in a simulator controlled at various CO2 levels and the existence of bio-effluents.
Sufficiently high CO2 accumulation and bio-effluent may be a safety concern if it impacts driver performance or mental state. Prior research has presented mixed results on the effect of CO2 levels on the cognition of building occupants. In addition, elevated human bio-effluents (e.g., isoprene, acetone, ethanol et al.) generated in conjunction with CO2 have been found to be correlated to decreased cognitive performance.
The study hired twenty-five participants as the subjects to measure their driving performance in a driving simulator with each segment at different CO2 levels (800, 1800, 3500 ppm) and with or without the bio-effluent. All other environmental parameters that could affect driving performance, like driving scenario, ventilation, lighting, temperature, humidity, etc., were kept the same to reduce the variability. The N-back task was introduced in the driving as the cognition task to measure drivers’ cognition performance. This study employed multi-objective (driving parameters, cognition task) and subjective (questionnaire) measures to characterize varying driver performance.
The results indicated that the drivers intend to keep the speed and acceleration in the different environmental conditions for the longitudinal control. The lateral control results (lane deviation, steering, or lateral acceleration) did not significantly differ for the various situations. The questionnaire results also show that participants did not report significantly different subjective feelings in different driving environments. However, the different CO2 levels greatly affected the error rate and reaction time in the cognition task.
The authors conclude that the different CO2 concentrations and the existence of bio-effluent had a slight effect on the cognition task. But no significant interactions indicated that CO2 or bio-effluent conditions have an additive effect on driving performance.
