Situation Awareness Measurement in Pedestrian Environments: A Comparison between Freeze-probing and Realtime-probing technique

Abstract Pedestrian safety is affected by their environment. Reduced pedestrian awareness is generally due to walking being an activity repeatedly every day. Situation Awareness (SA) measurements can evaluate a pedestrian's ability to handle environmental situations. This refers to the importance of knowing the SA of pedestrians using effective measurement methods. This study aims to evaluate methods of measuring SA based on the effectiveness of its measure in a pedestrian environment by comparing the freeze-probing and real-time-probing techniques. Participants were eleven pedestrians (seven male) with an average age of 22 (SD ± 1.3) years old and walking habits for 15 (SD ± 8.5) minutes/day. Participants watched a video of a pedestrian walking on a treadmill with three speed levels. SA was measured by freeze and realtime-probing in different scenarios. Performance was determined based on verbal protocol. The realtime-probing has better sensitivity, but it has more problems with intrusiveness. Based on the regression results between predictors in the form of SA scores and performance as dependent variables, this probe shows better predictive results at low workload conditions, which corresponds to the characteristics of the pedestrian domain. Based on its advantages, real-time-probing is considered more effective for SA measurement needs in pedestrian environments that tend to be simple, stable, and do not cause high workloads. An effective measurement method will result in an accurate measure of SA score that can be the basis for developing the concept of SA and designing new designs or procedures in the pedestrian environment.