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Exploring Older Driver Lateral Head Rotations at Intersections Using Naturalistic Driving Data
No full textThis study represented a meta-analysis across two naturalistic driving databases which were collected in the same geographic area but focused on distinct age groups. Differences in range of lateral head rotation between older and middle-aged drivers traversing the same pathway through unprotected left turn intersections were examined. These driving scenarios are known to be among the riskiest and most difficult for older drivers, who demonstrated an increased range of head rotation compared to their middle-aged counterparts. These results are interpreted in the context of possible compensation for reduced fields of view
Fast MicroSleep and Yawning Detections to Assess Driver’s Vigilance Level
No full textDriver hypovigilance, often caused by fatigue and/or drowsiness, receives increasing attention in the last years; especially after it became evident that hypovigilance is a one of the major factor causing traffic accidents. Monitoring and detecting driver hypovigilance could contribute significantly to improve road traffic safety. This paper proposes fast methods to identify drowsiness and fatigue using respectively microsleep and yawning detections. In this study, the proposed scheme begins by a face detection using local Successive Mean Quantization Transform (SMQT) features and split up Sparse Network of Winnows (SNoW) classifier. After performing face detection, the novel approach for eye/mouth detection, based on Circular Hough Transform (CHT), is applied on eyes and mouth extracted regions. Our proposed methods works in real-time and yield a high detection rates whether for drowsiness or fatigue detections
Texting While Driving: Evaluation of Glance Distributions for Frequent/Infrequent Texters and Keypad/Touchpad Texters
No full textThe threat that cell-phones pose to driving has been a well researched topic. There are fewer studies of the threat that texting creates for drivers, but the risks are obvious and the few existing studies confirm this. What is not obvious is whether frequent texters will expose themselves to the same risks as infrequent texters. This is important to know because many texters, especially teens who text frequently, may consider themselves immune to the dangers of texting while driving. As such, a comparison of frequent and infrequent texters was undertaken on a driving simulator. It is also not immediately clear what effects the different types of interfaces have on driving performance while text messaging. The interfaces under evaluation included keypad or “qwerty” phones (e.g., Blackberries) and touchpad phones (iPhone). It was found that the frequent and infrequent texters were equally likely to glance at least once for more than 2s inside the vehicle while sending a text message. It was also found that touchpad texters had a larger number of glances above the 2s threshold than keypad users, though this difference was not significant. The implications of this for future public policy are discussed
The Effects of Route Guidance on Spatial Learning
No full textParticipants engaged in five driving routes while performing a secondary PDT task. For each route, participants drove to four distinct destinations. Route guidance was given to all subjects to help guide them to their destinations. Most of the participants were able to complete each driving route within the allotted time of 10 minutes. The drivers had repeated exposures to the locations and routes between the destinations and were told they would be asked the whereabouts of the destinations at the end of the driving routes. Overall, the participants had difficulty explicitly marking the locations of the destinations on a map, and indicating directional relationship between buildings. PDT performance and lane deviation stayed consistent across driving route tasks. The participants performed best at naming the street locations where the buildings were located. The use of route guidance on the ability to process navigation information may suppress cognitive map formation
Attentional Tracking of Multiple Vehicles in a Highway Driving Scenario
No full textIn this paper we introduce a 'vehicle tracking' task, which tests the ability of a driver to track the location of multiple vehicles on the roadway. Based on the 'multiple object tracking' task (Pylyshyn & Storm, 1988), the vehicle tracking task presents the driver with an array of identical vehicles immediately in front of the subject vehicle. The task consists of three distinct stages: encoding, during which the target vehicles are indicated to the driver; tracking, during which all vehicles change lanes in a random order; and report, during which the participant indicates the final location of the target vehicles. Using this methodology, we test the accuracy with which university-aged drivers can track multiple vehicles in a 3-lane highway driving scenario. Our particular interest in this paper is how the ability to attend to multiple vehicles changes as task load increases
Long-Term Effects of Hazard Anticipation Training on Novice Drivers Measured on the Open Road
No full text(a) The purpose of this study was to determine whether novice drivers that were trained to anticipate hazards did so better than novice drivers who were not so trained immediately after training and up to one year after training oc-curred. (b) Novice drivers who had held their restricted license for about one month were randomly assigned to a PC-based hazard anticipation training pro-gram (RAPT) or a placebo (control) training program. The programs took about one hour to complete. The effects of training were assessed in a field drive by using patterns of eye movements to assess whether drivers anticipated a potential unseen hazard. (c) The effects of training persisted over time. In the field test immediately after training, the RAPT group anticipated the hazards 65.8% of the time whereas; the control group anticipated them only 47.3% of the time. Six or more months later, the groups were brought back for a second field test and the effects of training did not diminish; the RAPT group anticipated the hazards 61.9% of the time compared to 37.7% for the control group
Self-Rated Distress Related to Medical Conditions is Associated with Future Crashes or Traffic Offences in Older Drivers
No full textAgeing is associated with the development of medical conditions, both acute and chronic. The aim of this study was to determine whether medical factors were associated with subsequent self- and officially-reported crashes and traffic offences in a group of cognitively healthy older drivers. We surveyed medical conditions, medications taken for these conditions, and the amount of subjective distress associated with medical conditions in a group of 56 drivers aged 72-85 years for a period of 24 months. We also compared exposure to driving at baseline to the number of crashes or offences at 24 months. We found no relationship between the number of medical conditions or medications taken and whether a participant had a crash or offence. However, those who reported more subjective distress associated with their condition/s were more likely to have a crash or offence during the study period. Drivers who had a crash or offence also had a higher mean driving exposure. However, there was no relationship between reported distress and driving exposure which indicates that these may be independent risk factors for experiencing a crash or traffic offence
Assessing the Transfer of Simulator Trained Skills to Real Vehicle Control
No full textThe Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory is conducting a project to investigate the value of a motion based simulator in teaching vehicle control for off-road driving conditions. A primary goal is to reduce accidents caused by the loss of control of high center-of-gravity military vehicles in situations normally not found in the civilian driving experience. This study presents data from a two year portion of our work to develop metrics to assess the effectiveness of simulator training for developing vehicle control skills. For the first year, 10 drivers were trained using a simulator in an accident avoidance (AA) maneuver. Their performance was compared against 10 untrained drivers in a real vehicle. The second year 5 trained drivers from the first study were given sparse sustainment training in the simulator and again compared against 5 untrained drivers in a real vehicle. We considered metrics specifically related to the vehicle control aspects of the training to determine if the trainee acquired the necessary muscle memory to correctly implement the various vehicle control steps involved in the maneuver. We also briefly describe the participant’s views on their training experience
Detecting Transfer of Training Through Simulator Scenario Design: A Novice Driver Training Study
No full textNovice drivers in comparison to experienced drivers perform poorly due to incomplete mental models of roadway hazards. This paper describes the driving simulator scenario design methods used in a novice driver training study to detect a possible transfer of training for hazard perception. Applied in a high school driver education classroom, the data of trained versus un-trained drivers is presented for pre/post-test driving scenarios, N = 67. Results showed that while general simulator control performance between the trained and un-trained groups was similar, the trained group performed better at hazard events and exhibited fewer speeding behaviors at the post-test. Specific hazard encounters indicated that simulator training may have had an effect on performance even when the training group was not trained on the specific situation. Arguments for training transfer in hazard perception are presented
Lateral Control in a Driving Simulator: Correlations with Neuropsychological Tests and On-Road Safety Errors
No full textDriving simulators provide precise information on vehicular position at high capture rates. To analyze such data, we have previously proposed a time series model that reduces lateral position data into several parameters for measuring lateral control, and have shown that these parameters can detect differences between neurologically impaired and healthy drivers (Dawson et al, 2010a). In this paper, we focus on the “re-centering” parameter of this model, and test whether the parameter estimates are associated with off-road neuropsychological tests and/or with on-road safety errors. We assessed such correlations in 127 neurologically healthy drivers, ages 40 to 89. We found that our re-centering parameter had significant correlations with five neuropsychological tests: Judgment of Line Orientation (r = 0.38), Block Design (r = 0.27), Contrast Sensitivity (r = 0.31), Near Visual Acuity (r = -0.26), and Grooved Pegboard (r = -0.25). We also found that our re-centering parameter was associated with on-road safety errors at stop signs (r = -0.34) and on-road safety errors during turns (r = -0.22). These results suggest that our re-centering parameter may be a useful tool for measuring and monitoring ability to maintain vehicular lateral control. As GPS-based technology continues to improve in precision and reliability to measure vehicular positioning, our time-series model may potentially be applied as an automated index of driver performance in real world settings that is sensitive to cognitive decline. This work was supported by NIH/NIA awards AG17177, AG15071, and NS044930, and by a scholarship from Nissan Motor Company