Findings of a large-scale European naturalistic driving study: the i-DREAMS project.

Each year, road crashes result in over a million fatalities globally. Understanding driving behavior is thus essential to improve road safety. To that end, technological advances can help assist drivers real-time, as soon as they reach unsafe driving boundaries, but also after their trip to help them improve their long-term driving habits. This is the aim of the naturalistic driving study (NDS) presented in this paper. Relying on the well-known interrelation between task complexity-coping capacity (Fuller, 2005), this NDS conceptualizes a safety-tolerance-zone (STZ) concept to push drivers back into their safety envelope and implements it in the large-scale i-DREAMS project. This NDS develops a four-stage five-country experiment, collecting data in simulator and real-road conditions, across five EU countries covering four modes. The experiments result in about four million kilometres of driving data that provide insights on driving behavior in different conditions. The main objective of this paper is accordingly to set an example to future NDS, by highlighting the operational setting, main analysis findings, but also shedding light on the more practical experimental aspects and challenges, mostly during times of pandemic, in a world of increasing data regulations and restrictions.