Augmenting bicycles and helmets with multimodal warnings for children

Child cyclists are often at greater risk for traffic accidents. This is in part due to the development of children's motor and perceptual-motor abilities. To facilitate road safety for children, we explore the use of multimodal warning signals to increase their awareness and prime action in critical situations. We developed a bicycle simulator instrumented with these signals and conducted two controlled experiments. We found that participants spent significantly more time perceiving visual than auditory or vibrotactile cues. Unimodal signals were the easiest to recognize and suitable for encoding directional cues. However, when priming stop actions, reaction time was shorter when all three modalities were used simultaneously. We discuss the implications of these outcomes with regard to design of safety systems for children and their perceptual-motor learning.