Assisting the older driver - SWOV

Assisting the older driver
less decelerations of relevant other vehicles. The message regarding an
unexpected one‐way street led to fewer route‐errors.
Type of message
Priority regulation
Right of Way
Yield to Right
Approaching Major Road
Workload
(+ = higher workload)
0
0
+
Safety of driver decisions
(+ = safer decisions)
+
+
+
Safe gaps 0 +
Short sight distances 0 +
Deviating situation: one‐way street + Fewer route errors
Table 3. Effects of in‐car assistance systems.
Differential effect of functional age
As the assistive devices described above were selected based on the relative
weaknesses of the older driver, it was expected that older drivers would
benefit more from their support than younger drivers would. That is, it was
expected that people with functional limitations will benefit more from the
support provided by the selected assistive devices than people with no
functional limitations. Therefore, functional age rather than chronological
age was used to compare workload and driving performance between age
groups. Functional age was based on scores on three tests of cognitive
functioning, relating to reaction time, selective attention, and visual‐motor
coordination. Persons scoring well on the average of these three tests were
considered to be functionally young, whereas persons scoring relatively poor
on them were considered to be functionally old. People scoring in between
were considered to be functionally middle‐aged. Although it turned out that
the majority of the chronologically older people was also functionally old,
there were some exceptions. One of the chronologically old participants even
appeared to be functionally young. At the same time, two of the
chronologically young participants appeared to be functionally old. This
underlines the importance of a personal approach in decisions about fitness
to drive.
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