Car Cellphone Bans Driving Bluetooth

jmatheny14 noted that the BBC is running an article about an unexpected side effect of car cellphone bans. It says"Legislation banning the use of mobile phones in cars is spurring car manufactures to look for alternatives such as Bluetooth." and "Because it can be used with a hands-free headset that can connect to a mobile phone even if the device is some distance away, it could be a perfect way to get around the ban."

Comments

Not what drove me...

[toupsie]

Car Cellphone Bans Driving Bluetooth

I bought an Ericsson T68i phone because of iSync and its connection to the phone via Bluetooth -- lets you also send SMS from the computer. Nothing sucks more about a cell phone than trying to use the keypad to enter phone book items. Plus the Ericsson T68 is pretty much a Palm killer with its Calendar and voice recorder.

Re:Why? - b/c it's dangerous!

[tchapin]

Here's some interesting reading:

• here's a topic specific page
• and a google search

People try to do way too many things while driving. I have a bad habit of talking on the phone, as well as switching CDs. Driving is difficult b/c it can be so unpredictable, and people lose sight of that fact. Here's some articles on use of telematics while driving:

• indiana state medical assoc.
• nhtsa
• in fact, here's a google search

My company recently did a study on telematics use and driver/user attention, and it was pretty freaky how poorly people were able to attend to their main task while performing the secondary telematics task.

Todd

Hands-Free is Not a Panacea

[herwin]

Research indicates the problem with using a cell phone while driving is the distraction of conducting a phone conversation while also controlling a car, not the hands off the steering wheel. Drivers using a head-set experience the same increase in accident rate (to a level similar to driving drunk) as drivers using a cell-phone. See this legal discussion.

The trouble is not found in the handset

[Brother Fjordhr]

The trouble with cell phone safety is not in the nature of the handset (or hands free set) it is in the conditioned response to phone calls. All this article seems to be pushing is another hands free approach to cell phones. This article http://http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1885775.stm reports that, "hands-free kits were almost as dangerous as hand-held phones."

The point of this article is that, "Reaction and stopping times were much slower Talking on a mobile phone while driving is more dangerous than being over the legal alcohol limit, according to research."

This article http://http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/n ews/2001/01/25/Consumers/cellphones_study010125 provides this quote on the issue

"The bandwidth of the brain is actually quite limited," says Dr. John Vavrick, the research psychologist in charge of the study.

"Time sharing and multi-tasking does not come easily to the human brain."

The study used 41 drivers and gave each a series of tests to perform while answering questions through a speaker in the car.

Researchers found the driver's mental state was equally affected whether he or she was using a hands-free phone or not.

This is just a small sampling of the articles of the danger presented by using a cellphone while driving. The risk just isn't worth it, hang up and drive!.

Re:The trouble is not found in the handset

[Waffle Iron]

For some more than others. Sadly, the more bandwidth limited are the least likely to realize this.

Actually, I'm a low bandwidth person, and I'm very aware of it. What I mean is that while I am IMHO brilliant, my brain has noticeably less I/O bandwidth than most people. I guess more of my brain functions got allocated to high level processing, and less to DSP-like tasks.

This bugs the hell out of my wife because I just can't effectively talk or listen while I'm trying to do or think about something else. She thinks that I'm intentionally tuning her out when often I wasn't even aware that I should be tuning her in.

Even though I have excellent hearing as rated by hearing tests, I've always had a hard time picking out conversations in noisy environments such as bars. Not enough noise rejection circutry.

Since cellphone calls usually have poor quality and lots of noise, I often find it hard to decode what the other person is saying in real time even if I'm doing nothing else. A big problem with cellphones and driving in general is that it seems to take up much more of your brain's low level I/O functions to recover the conversation signal out of a crappy cellphone speaker than it does to just talk to a passenger normally.

I am a good driver, so I think that I have plenty of geometry and physics processing ability. It seems to me, though, once your low level audio processing has failed to successfully decode the message, the brain can pull in cycles (inefficently) from higher level areas. You use more of the language and logic processing centers to error correct what you're hearing at a higher semantic layer. I think that this can starve the portion of your logic ability that's needed to support the low level driving tasks.

Basically, regardless of how the handset works, I think cellphones will be dangerous for driving until they significantly clean up the audio quality.