Empathic vehicle design: Use cases and design directions from two workshops

Empathic vehicles are expected to improve user experience in automated vehicles and to help increase user acceptance of technology. However, little is known about potential real-world implementations and designs using empathic interfaces in vehicles with higher levels of automation. Given advances in affect detection and emotion mitigation, we conducted two workshops (N1 =24, N2 = 22, Ntotal = 46) on the design of empathic vehicles and their potential utility in a variety of applications. This paper recapitulates key opportunities in the design and application of empathetic interfaces in automated vehicles which emerged from the two workshops hosted at the ACM AutoUI conferences.