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Rapid mobilization of emergency vehicles in the urban or rural road network presents a high probability of collisions and other related hazards to other drivers. Yet uninterrupted high speeds of the emergency vehicles through traffic are imperative for the successful patient transfer or negotiation of fire and flood emergencies. The utilisation of contemporary emergency vehicle sirens as an early warning system has proved inefficient and in some cases unsafe as the localisation characteristics of siren patterns, combined with ambient noise, has a detrimental effect on the average driver's ability to spatially define the position of the incoming emergency vehicle. This paper examines the inherent issues in the localisation of the incoming emergency vehicle audible warning systems and suggests a prototype system for faster localisation propensity of the incoming vehicle.

Human cognitive and physiological performance tends to enfeeble during time. Evidently a distinct attenuation of reaction-times spatial and situational awareness appears in the older segments of the driving population which increases rapidly in the western civilisation. Additionally, greater dependence on private automotive transportation and the unremitting raise of the elderly population, contributes to a significant increase of collision occurrences. To this end we have designed a prototype Head-Up-Display (HUD) interface which offers crucial information to the driver, in a timely manner. The interface comprises symbolic representation of the lead vehicles and road information acting as a vision enhancement system. The evaluation of the system contrasted the proposed HUD interface to the existing Head-Down Displays (HDD) offering encouraging results, with significantly decrease collision occurrences tested different accident scenarios.

This paper presents the design and development of a prototype Head-Up Display (HUD) interface that offer early notification warnings of potential collisions under unfavourable weather and traffic conditions. In this work we particularly focus our effort in the embedment of traffic congestion and sharp turn visual warnings in a working prototype interface. In turn we present the results of a large scale evaluation of the system on a group of forty users, which contrasted the use of the proposed HUD against a typical HDD. Finally the paper offers suggestions for further research and a tentative plan for future work.

Often the level of the driver's control over the vehicle is qualitatively compromised due to the plethora and the ineffectiveness of driving interface designs. This research effort focuses on the development of a prototype Head-Up Display (HUD) interface that can complement the driver's decision-making process rather than replace it, and decrease response times under adverse weather and traffic conditions. The evaluation of the proposed system was conducted over 40 user trials using a driving simulator. In this paper we present a succinct overview of the HUD system and comment on the headway results derived from a comparative study between the HUD and a contemporary instrumentation panel.