Automated vehicles are entering the roads and automation is applied to cars, trucks, buses, and even motorcycles today. High automation foresees transitions during driving in both directions. The driver and rider state become a critical parameter since reliable automation allows safe intervention and transit control to the automation when manual driving is not performed safely anymore. When the control transits from automation to manual an appropriate driver state needs to be identified before releasing the automated control. The detection of driver states during manual and automated driving and an appropriate design of the human–machine interaction (HMI) are crucial steps to support these transitions. State‐of‐the‐art systems do not take the driver state, personal preferences, and predictions of road conditions into account. The ADAS&ME project, funded by the H2020 Programme of the European Commission, proposes an innovative and fully adaptive HMI framework, able to support driver/rider state monitoring‐based transitions in automated driving. The HMI framework is applied in the target vehicles: passenger car, truck, bus, and motorcycle, and in seven different use cases.

In automated driving it is important to ensure drivers’ awareness of the currently active level of automation and to support transitions between those levels. This is possible with $a$ suitable human-machine interface (HMI). In this driving simulator study, two visual HMI concepts (Concept $A$ and $B$ ) were compared with $a$ baseline for informing drivers about three modes: manual driving, assisted driving, and automated driving. The HMIs, consisting of LED strips on the steering wheel that differed in luminance, color, and pattern, provided continuous information about the active mode and announced transitions. The assisted mode was conveyed in Concept $A$ using $a$ combination of amber and blue LEDs, while in Concept $B$ only amber LEDs were used. During automated driving Concept $A$ displayed blue LEDs and Concept B, turquoise. Both concepts were compared to $a$ baseline HMI, with no LEDs. Thirty-eight drivers with driving licence were trained and participated. Objective measures (hands-on-wheel time, takeover time, and visual attention) are reported. Self-reported measures (mode awareness, trust, user experience, and user acceptance) from $a$ previous publication are briefly repeated in this context (Muthumani et al.). Concept $A$ showed 200 ms faster hands-on-wheel times than the baseline, while in Concept $B$ several outliers were observed that prevented significance. The visual HMIs with LEDs did not influence the eyes-on-road time in any of the automation levels. Participants preferred Concept B, with more prominent differentiation between the automation levels, over Concept A.

Higher levels of automated driving may offer the possibility to sleep in the driver’s seat in the car, and it is foreseeable that drivers will voluntarily or involuntarily fall asleep when they do not need to drive. Post-sleep performance impairments due to sleep inertia, a brief period of impaired cognitive performance after waking up, is a potential safety issue when drivers need to take over and drive manually. The present study assessed whether sleep inertia has an effect on driving and cognitive performance after different sleep durations. A driving simulator study with n = 13 participants was conducted. Driving and cognitive performance were analyzed after waking up from a 10–20 min sleep, a 30–60 min sleep, and after resting without sleep. The study’s results indicate that a short sleep duration does not reliably prevent sleep inertia. After the 10–20 min sleep, cognitive performance upon waking up was decreased, but the sleep inertia impairment faded within 15 min. Although the driving parameters showed no significant difference between the conditions, participants subjectively felt more tired after both sleep durations compared to resting. The small sample size of 13 participants, tested in a within-design, may have prevented medium and small effects from becoming significant. In our study, take-over was offered without time pressure, and take-over times ranged from 3.15 min to 4.09 min after the alarm bell, with a mean value of 3.56 min in both sleeping conditions. The results suggest that daytime naps without previous sleep deprivation result in mild and short-term impairments. Further research is recommended to understand the severity of impairments caused by different intensities of sleep inertia.