OREANDA-NEWS. July 27, 2015. An expert jury from the networking and strategy group we.CONECT has honored Continental's Driver Focus Vehicle concept car with the prestigious "CAR HMI Concepts & System Award 2015" in the "Most Innovative HMI-Feature" category. The Driver Focus Vehicle connects a versatile LED light band with vehicle assistance systems, such as lane departure warning, adaptive cruise control, and collision warning, as well as an infrared camera mounted in the passenger compartment that detects the attentiveness of the driver. The light band encompasses the entire area in the vehicle that is visible to the driver and alerts him or her to any potential hazards on the road. It uses light signals adapted to the current situation to guide the driver's eyes intuitively toward the traffic situation ahead.

"Approximately 90% of accidents are due to human error. The Driver Focus Vehicle marks the first time we have developed a system that dynamically adjusts the assistance systems to the attentiveness of the driver. We can direct the driver's attentiveness and actively avoid collisions," said Ralf Lenninger, head of Strategy, System Development, and Innovation of Continental's Interior division. "The Driver Focus Vehicle takes us an important step forward toward our goal of achieving accident-free driving. We are exceptionally pleased that the prestigious CAR HMI Concepts & Systems Conference has recognized this HMI safety system as the most innovative design in the area of human-machine interfaces for the automotive market."

For Continental, the Driver Focus Vehicle is a completely new approach to human-machine interface design. The information is dynamically processed and adapted to the situation and the driver's level of attentiveness.

This principle is an important part of a holistic human-machine interface that dynamically incorporates the driver’s level of attentiveness, as well as the environmental conditions into a system overarching HMI design. As a result, drivers are in an ongoing dialog with their vehicle – even without words – and receive the information relevant for the driving situation at the right time and in the right way. By this, Continental also demonstrates an important building block in the design of a human machine interface for highly and fully automated vehicles.

Jury members included notable experts in automotive engineering and human-machine interface design. On the jury were Manfred Tscheligi, director of the Center for Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society (ICT&S) at the University of Salzburg; Niranjan Thiyagrajan, senior consultant for automotive & transportation at Frost & Sullivan, UK; Dr. Christian M?ller, director of the Automotive Group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum f?r K?nstliche Intelligenz), Kaiserslautern; and Dr. Marc Hassenzahl, director of the "Experience Design" group at Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen.

The event organizer we.CONECT donated 2,000 euros to the nonprofit organization World Bicycle Relief, which has already distributed more than 220,000 bicycles to students, medical personnel, and small businesses in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. "We welcome this type of community outreach and global commitment,” said Lenninger. “It fits perfectly with one of our core company values – For One Another."