oa Authoring critical situations for assessing driving ability among drivers with visual field defects

Driving is a visually demanding task (Owsley, et al., 2008), manifested in visual ability requirements. Sweden, does not allow on road assessment of drivers with visual field defects. However, driving simulators can be used for fitness to drive assessment (Rizzo, 2011) but authoring driving scenarios is a critical task Vardaki et al. (2014). This paper discuss a driving simulator based assessment method aiming to assess drivers with visual field defects. The driving task includes 37 situations based on well-known critical driving situations along three driving environments: rural, motorway and urban. Most of the situations occur in urban context, e.g. pedestrians crossing the road, vehicles suddenly appearing. Each situation was assessed with a set of critical measures, e.g. brake reaction time, time based safety margins, speed keeping etc. Driving data from almost a hundred drivers, both with and without visual field defects, were collected and analyzed. The results are currently being analyzed. So far it seems like some situation were better than others, specifically in terms of timing. The possibility to drive at your own pace made some participants drive very careful and others over the speed limit. This had a strong impact on the criticality of the situations and their usefulness in determining driving ability. The developed situation on rural road worked very well, in terms of timing and criticality. The option to overtake at your own choice on the motorway introduced some variation in behavior that need further consideration. Urban road driving included critical situations difficult to master even for a driver with no visual defect. The next step will be to investigate behavior metrics in term of the ability to discriminate between those with visual field defects and those without. References: Rizzo M., (2011) Medical Disorders. Handbook of Driving Simulation for Engineering, Medicine and Psychology, CRC Press. Owsley, C., Wood, J., McGwin, G, (2008). A roadmap for interpreting the literature on vision and driving. Survey of Ophthalmology, Volume 60, Issue 3, May–June 2015, Pages 250–262. Vardaki, S, Yannis, G, Papageorgiou, S G, (2014) Assessing Selected Cognitive Impairments Using a Driving Simulator: A Focused Review. Advances in Transportation Studies, Volume 34, University Roma Tre, Pages 105 – 128