Older Drivers and Vision Impairment: Naturalistic Driving Studies

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究的目的是确定视力障碍如何影响老年驾驶员的安全和性能。老年人停止驾驶与许多负面健康指标有关，包括抑郁症风险增加，获得医疗服务的机会减少，以及长期护理的可能性增加。当我们认识到视力障碍在老年人中很常见时，老年驾驶员研究的社会意义就非常明显了，与其他年龄组相比，老年驾驶员的机动车碰撞率最高。一个关键的科学挑战是确定老年人安全驾驶所需的视力方面。以前对老年驾驶员安全和性能的研究主要集中在警察事故报告，简短的驾驶评估或驾驶模拟器研究。这些技术具有严重的科学局限性;碰撞研究不能提供导致碰撞的信息;在道路研究中，研究人员在车辆中可能会对驾驶员的行为产生偏见;模拟器研究呈现了过于简化的人工卡通场景 道路环境。所有这些问题都削弱了理解驾驶员表现和安全的实际视觉因素的能力。自然主义驾驶方法通过在车辆中不引人注目地放置多个传感器和摄像机来克服这些限制，这些传感器和摄像机记录车辆运动学、驾驶员行为（例如，注视行为）和道路环境。它们允许驾驶员在自己的车辆中长时间（数月）以客观的方式研究驾驶，其中驾驶员在日常生活中选择路线。在这项研究中，我们将使用自然驾驶技术来研究视力和老年驾驶员的安全和性能之间的关系。我们专注于视力正常的老年驾驶员和那些有对比敏感度缺陷和视觉处理速度减慢的驾驶员，因为这些问题是老年人驾驶问题中最强烈和最一致的视觉风险因素。分析将集中在视觉和关键安全事件（碰撞，接近碰撞），车道保持，在十字路口转弯，驾驶之间的关系 在次要任务要求下，以及当“副驾驶”（乘客）存在时。这些关系将根据其他驾驶员特征、环境因素和 车辆因素。通过自然驾驶方法测量的驾驶性能也将与驾驶康复专家在标准化驾驶路线上提供的驾驶评级进行比较，这是目前的临床金标准。这项研究将刺激干预措施的发展，以提高视力受损的老年人的驾驶机动性，从而提高生活质量。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The objective of this research is to identify how visual impairment impacts the safety and performance of older drivers. Driving cessation in older adults is tied to many negative health indicators including increased risk for depression, reduced access to healthcare services, and increased likelihood of placement into long-term-care. The societal significance of research on older drivers is dramatically apparent when we recognize that vision impairment is common in the older adult population, and that older drivers have among the highest rates of motor vehicle collisions compared to other age groups. A critical scientific challenge is to identify what aspects of vision are required for safe driving by older adults. Previous research on older driver safety and performance has focused on the study of police accident reports, brief driving evaluations, or driving simulator studies. These techniques have serious scientific limitations; crash studies do not provide information about what lead up to the collision; in on-road studies research personnel are in the vehicle potentially biasing how the driver behaves; simulator studies present artificial, cartoon-like scenarios that over-simplify the roadway environment. All these issues undermine the ability to understand the actual visual factors underlying driver performance and safety. Naturalistic driving methods overcome these limitations by unobtrusively placing multiple sensors and video cameras in the vehicle that record vehicle kinematics, driver behaviors (e.g., gaze behavior), and roadway environment. They allow driving to be studied in an objective way over lengthy time periods (months) in the driver's own vehicle where the driver chooses the route during the course of everyday life. In this research we will use naturalistic driving techniques to examine the relationships between vision and older driver safety and performance. We focus on older drivers with normal vision and those with contrast sensitivity deficits and slowed visual processing speed, since these problems are the strongest and most consistently identified visual risk factors for driving problems in the older adult population. Analyses will focus on the relationship between vision and critical safety events (crashes, near-crashes), lane-keeping, turning at intersections, driving under secondary tasks demands, and when a "co-pilot" (passenger) is present. These relationships will be examined in light of other driver characteristics, environmental factors, and vehicle factors. Driving performance as measured by naturalistic driving methods will also be compared to driving ratings provided by a driving rehabilitation specialist on a standardized driving route, which is currently the clinical gold standard. This research will stimulate the development of interventions to enhance driving mobility in visually impaired older adults and thus improve quality of life.