Digital Assistive Technology: The Online Assistance for a Peaceful Driving in Automated and Connected Vehicles.

In line with the progressive development of digital technologies, this theoretical article is about the conception of a digital twin - based assistant to increase the serenity of the journey of the occupants of a connected car, automated or not. Its main functions are (i) to manage the Human (driver and/or passenger) - Machine (vehicle) Interaction, (ii) to inform the occupants and support decision-making by avoiding stressful situations. This is done by appropriate prevention and remediation. We advocate that the virtual assistant functions for being empathetic can be done by taking the user's point of view. Thanks to the knowledge about tasks, practices, needs and constraints, we describe how car-user's individual features can be used to get her digital twin description. Based on ontologies, this features model, providing assistance is then to simulate online the next steps of the task realization, informing about conditions, prerequisites, post-requites and subtasks to be fulfilled. Expected effects of this cognitive technology dedicated to personalized assistance are a decrease in stress, in frequency of incident and accident situations, according to a monitoring, as complete as possible, of the car-driver's conditions and situations dedicated to a serene driving.

Self-monitoring of gaze in high functioning autism.

Atypical visual behaviour has been recently proposed to account for much of social misunderstanding in autism. Using an eye-tracking system and a gaze-contingent lens display, the present study explores self-monitoring of eye motion in two conditions: free visual exploration and guided exploration via blurring the visual field except for the focal area of vision. During these conditions, thirteen students with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders (HFASD) and fourteen typical individuals were presented naturalistic and interactive social stimuli using virtual reality. Fixation data showed a weaker modulation of eye movements according to the conditions in the HFASD group, thus suggesting impairments in self-monitoring of gaze. Moreover, the gaze-contingent lens induced a visual behaviour whereby social understanding scores were correlated with the time spent gazing at faces. The device could be useful for treating gaze monitoring deficiencies in HFASD.