Italy, April 19, 2006 – Honda Motor Europe Ltd. and the University of Padua in Italy, announced the start of a joint research project, to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of Honda’s Motorcycle Riding Trainer.

The Honda Riding Trainer is a compact and affordable riding simulator which addresses the issue of hazard awareness, by improving the hazard perception skills of riders of powered two wheelers, as shown in previous research carried out by Nihon University in Japan in 2005. The Riding Trainer is the result of 17 years of intensive research at Honda into motorcycle simulation technologies and is now steadily being made available in Europe. To support this activity and improved motorcycle safety on European roads, Honda committed to the European Road Safety Charter in November 2005.

The project ‘HRT Psychological Evaluation’ aims to go beyond and improve on what has been done in other parts of the world in this area and investigates the effectiveness of the Riding Trainer in a European setting. The project will develop a multidisciplinary approach to identify the changes produced by using the Riding Trainer in the ability to detect hazardous situations, and will refine the training procedure in order to increase its effectiveness.

The University of Padua, through its Department of General Psychology, will coordinate and carry out this innovative research. The scholars involved in the project include Prof. Giulio Vidotto, expert in Psychometrics and project coordinator; Prof. Osvaldo Da Pos expert in Perception; Dr. Luciano Gamberini and Dr. Anna Spagnolli members of the Human Technology Laboratory and experts in Ergonomics.

In the first phase of the research, this project aims to develop a scientific and international methodology to measure improved hazard perception skills for hazard perception simulators. The University of Padua will include additional expertise from other internationally reputed partners and experts from Germany and the United Kingdom in order to contribute to the development of this methodology. These are i2 media research - a spin-off company from Goldsmiths College, University of London, specialists in the evaluation of consumer experience of new media products and services, and applying insights from these evaluations to the design and development of more effective electronic products and services and Dr. Astros Chatziastros, a research scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics of Tübingen.

In the subsequent phase, the newly developed methodology will be applied to the Riding Trainer, in order to measure and evaluate its performance in terms of increased hazard perception of the people undertaking the tests, and draw conclusions for the future.