Frederico Pereira

Computer Graphics Center - Research & Technology Development · Perception Interaction and Usability

The advent of autonomous vehicles (AVs) has sparked many concerns about pedestrian safety, prompting manufacturers and researchers to integrate external Human–Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) into AVs as communication tools between vehicles and pedestrians. The evolving dynamics of vehicle–pedestrian interactions make eHMIs a compelling strategy for enha...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0281680.].

The widespread adoption of electric vehicles presents an opportunity to reduce the contribution of road traffic to noise pollution. However, concerns have been raised about the increased danger that quieter vehicles pose to other road users, as they may be less detectable. To address these concerns, Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems (AVAS) are curr...

Environmental noise control regulations typically employ noise level descriptors to set limits for noise exposure. However, other characteristics of noise, such as frequency content, temporal patterns and masking, have been proven to influence the perception of acoustic environments. In this sense, psychoacoustic indicators offer an objective means...

We present an experimental research aiming to explore how spatial attention may be biased through auditory stimuli. In particular, we investigate how synchronous sound and image may affect attention and increase the saliency of the audiovisual event. We have designed and implemented an experimental study where subjects, wearing an eye-tracking syst...

Road traffic noise is the most common source of community noise in urban areas, causing adverse impacts on the health and well-being of the exposed population. Therefore, mastering road traffic noise perception is key to tackling noise pollution. Vehicle noise is mainly produced by the tyre/pavement interaction, especially for light vehicles, which...

A set of road traffic pass-by noises containing more than 2000 vehicles was recorded following the Statistical Pass-By (SPB) methodology (ISO 11819-1:2022). Besides the acoustic descriptors, psychoacoustic indicators (loudness, sharpness, roughness, fluctuation strength) were retrieved for each pass-by of the three vehicle categories defined in the...

Clinical auditory alarms are often found in hospital wards and operating rooms. In these environments, regular daily tasks can result in having a multitude of concurrent sounds (from staff and patients, building systems, carts, cleaning devices, and importantly, patient monitoring devices) which easily amount to a prevalent cacophony. The negative...

Listening tests are often an essential part of sound design but can be re- source intensive to carry out. Where there are many degrees of freedom in the sound design parameters, the ‘curse of dimensionality’, means that the number of trials re- quired to reliably understand the impact of a particular design variable increases ex- ponentially with i...

Virtual reality is becoming an important tool for studying the interaction between pedestrians and road vehicles, by allowing the analysis of potentially hazard situations without placing subjects in real risk. However, most of the current simulators are unable to accurately recreate traffic sounds that are congruent with the visual scene. This has...

Nowadays, numerous organisations of different dimensions and business sectors operate in highly challenging and dynamic environments, wherein the supporting information systems (IS) are becoming increasingly complex. In this context, assistive tools capable of tackling such complexity have the potential to aid users improving their performance and...

The controlled study of pedestrians’ crossing decision-making is relevant to the search for better safety conditions for this class of vulnerable road users. Several risk factors have been identified in the literature related to the crosswalks’ surrounding environment, the socio-demographic characteristics of the pedestrians crossing the road and t...

Recent research and amendments to standards have called for a paradigm shift when designing for healthcare spaces. While these are currently populated with melodic, hard to learn alarms and other noise sources, the benefits of harmonious alarms inside healing soundscapes seem promising for patients. We propose alarms for the Temperature IEC 60601-1...

Recently, several studies on pedestrian safety and particularly those addressing pedestrian crossing behaviour and decision-making, have been performed using virtual reality systems. The use of simulators to assess pedestrian behaviour is conditioned by the feeling of presence and immersion, for which the sound is a determining factor. This paper p...

1 Abstract Virtual reality is becoming an important tool for studying the interaction between pedestrians and road vehicles, by allowing the analysis of potentially hazard situations without placing subjects in real risk. However, most of the current simulators are unable to accurately recreate traffic sounds that are congruent with the visual scen...

An online sound categorization study was carried out to assess the association of everyday sounds with regard to medical equipment audio alarms. There were seven clinical alarm risk categories as described in IEC 6060-1-1-8 as well as an additional alarm category for 'Blood Pressure'. After a headphone screening test, participants categorized all s...

Human ability to detect auditory alarms in the presence of noise has been identified as an issue in various working environments, with potentially serious consequences. Spectral masking of alarms is recognized as a contributing factor to response failures. In this paper, a GNU OCTAVE code implementation for the estimation of spectral masking is det...

Supplemental Digital Content for the submitted paper CATEGORIZATION OF SOUNDS FOR THE DESIGN OF CLINICAL AUDITORY ALARMS

When crossing a road, pedestrians must detect traffic, combine data coming from different perceptual modalities, evaluate the time envelope for safely cross the street, and monitor the position of oncoming vehicles to perform corrective actions if needed. This study analyzed the influence of noise emitted by vehicles, or its absence, on pedestrians...

In most headphone-based spatial auditory display applications that use Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs), the presence of the headphone interferes with the listener’s natural spatial hearing abilities with regard to the “live” sound within their immediate environment. This paper describes an application of binaural technology in which a novel...