Ready2Drive - Interactive Online Video-Based Driving Tasks for Assessment of Driving-Related Skills of Older Drivers

Abstract

Elderly drivers are at a higher risk of road accidents, mostly due to ageing-influenced degradation of motoric, sensory and cognitive skills, which can lead to longer traffic incident detection and response times, worse risk perception, poorer decision making, and worsened performance of simultaneous tasks. To raise awareness among the elderly population and support medical practitioners about these issues, we have developed an online platform with two video-based interactive tasks which aimed at assessing driver's elements of situational awareness, attention and response inhabitation of elderly drivers. The results show that elderly participants, aged over 60 years old in this case, experience difficulties in maintaining high situational awareness of the driving environment, and found hard responding to inappropriate stimuli, which may indicate a decline in cognitive skills.