Incorporating driver activity in holistic comfort models

We motivate and describe a holistic comfort model to account for the impact of driver and passenger activities on their comfort experiences in vehicles. The proposed model is an expansion of existing ones and postulates two dimensions of comfort that are linked with cognitive moderation processes toward holistic experience: physiological comfort combines multiple physiological experiences such as thermal, auditory, and postural comfort and is moderated via cognitive processes of focusing or masking. On the other hand, emotional comfort reflects the experience of activities and is moderated by cognitive appraisal processes.

Using this model, we derive three hypotheses that are examined.

In a driving simulator study, 32 participants assessed holistic and physiological comfort while driving under various conditions.

The participant responses on various comfort questions loaded on two main principal components that closely resemble the distinction between holistic and physiological comfort. Also, the driving and non-driving activity types seemed to have a different impact on holistic versus physiological comfort as predicted by our model.