Situation awareness of distracted walking based on eye-tracking study

Situation Awareness (SA) refers to a person’s understanding of their environment and ability to predict future states. Various studies emphasize SA’s importance and accurate measurement methods to determine the actual effects of elements in the environment to achieve SA. The phenomenon of distracted walking due to the rise of mobile phone technology highlights the importance of identifying pedestrians’ SA based on their visual attention. Direct SA measurement’s limitations can be complemented by physiological-based SA measurement, which provides real-time, objective data with minimal disruption, such as eye-tracking. This study aims to explore the sensitivity of eye-tracking metrics to changes in the pedestrian environment and its validity based on the performance of pedestrians in obtaining information from their environment. This study was performed by an experiment involving ten healthy pedestrians (six males, four females) aged 22 years (SD ± 1.3). They walked on a treadmill while observing a video representing the pedestrian environment in two different scenarios, i.e.: ‘with distraction’ of a phone conversation and ‘non-distraction.’ A mobile eye-tracker recorded and analyzed participants’ behavior and visual allocation to the simulated video of the pedestrian environment. The results are consistent with the initial hypotheses confirming eye-tracking’s effectiveness in representing pedestrian SA by providing evidence of sensitivity to phone ‘distraction’ and predictive validity of eye-tracking metrics. These findings provide insights to improve the design of transport systems by evaluating policies and legal restrictions for pedestrians regarding the use of current mobile device technology. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2024.