CAEE Seminar - Driving and Early-Stage Dementia: An Instrumented Vehicle Study.

The Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering Department will host a Seminar featuring David W. Eby, Research Professor and Head of the Behavioral Sciences Group at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. His lecture is entitled Driving and Early-Stage Dementia: An Instrumented Vehicle Study. Zongzhi Li, a Professor of Civil and Architectural Engineering, will also be hosting the seminar.
 

Abstract

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, 1 in 8 people age 65 and older, and about one-half of people age 85 and older, have Alzheimer’s disease in the United States (US). There is evidence that drivers with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are at an increased risk for unsafe driving. Advances in sensor, computer, and telecommunication technologies provide a method for automatically collecting detailed, objective information about the driving performance of drivers, including those with early-stage dementia. This seminar discusses a project that used in-vehicle technology to describe a set of driving behaviors that might be common in individuals with early-stage dementia (i.e., a diagnosis of memory loss) and compare these behaviors to a group of drivers without cognitive impairment. Drivers diagnosed with early-stage dementia, who had completed a comprehensive driving assessment and were cleared to drive, participated in the study. Participants had their vehicles instrumented with a suite of sensors and a data acquisition system and drove 1-2 months as they would under normal circumstances. Data from the early-stage dementia group were compared to similar data from an existing dataset of 26 older drivers without dementia. The project’s methodology, results, and implications will be discussed.