Senior Mobility Program

For the initial phases of the study, 40 participants made up of 20 senior drivers, and 20 seniors who had given up driving within the last two years, underwent a battery of assessment testing. The testing included driving history, participant health and vision tests, physical strength, and reaction time.

The 20 drivers also participated in a naturalistic driving study whereby each had his/her private vehicles instrumented with an extensive yet unobtrusive data acquisition system (DAS) for one year each. Data were continuously gathered including the following: 4 channel video (driver's face, instrument cluster, and forward and rear roadway images), GPS, lane tracking, accelerometers in three dimensions, gyro yaw, forward radar, and vehicle network information (e.g., brake, accelerator, transmission status).

The study captured over 4,600 hours and over 29,000 trip files of naturalistic driving data, generating some 2.5 TB (terabytes) of raw video, driving behavior, vehicle kinematics, and crash and near crash data. The primary goals of the research program are to study seniors' transportation behaviors, abilities/impairments, needs, concerns, and crash related events in an attempt to develop countermeasures which facilitate independence and safe mobility. The results of this pilot implementation are currently being tallied.