Pedestrian Auditory Situational Awareness: Tesseract Crosswalk Module

Abstract

Driver and environmental factors, perceptual limitations, and distractions typically dictate how vulnerable pedestrians are while crossing the street at signalized or unsignalized crosswalks. The series of research supported through CATM funding seeks to systematically investigate critical factors associated with unsafe crosswalk activities. First, naturalistic observations of pedestrians performing street crossing on a rural higher education campus informed the development of a 1:1 physical and virtual crosswalk testbed used to study pedestrian auditory situation awareness (ASA) with personal listening devices (PLD). Thereafter, the investigation of intervention technologies for low-vision pedestrians is ongoing to better understand how to design human-machine interfaces for implementing appropriate countermeasures to reduce pedestrian distractions at crosswalks. Lastly, a mobile testbed is to be developed for remote education and training in safe street crossings.