The United States Version of the Stroke Drivers’ Screening Assessment Battery: a Report of Preliminary Findings

We investigated the potential for predicting driving performance of a United States (US)-based population of participants using an adapted version of the Stroke Drivers’ Screening Assessment (SDSA) battery. Participants included seven first-ever stroke survivors (age 51±8 years) and 11 individuals with Hoehn & Yahr Stage 2 or 3 Parkinson’s disease (PD) (age 65±8 years). We adapted the original United Kingdom (UK) version of the SDSA to make it suitable for use in the US by replacing all UK-specific traffic situations and road signs with their US equivalents. Following administration of the adapted (US) version of the SDSA, stroke participants’ driving performance was evaluated in a driving simulator. PD participants’ driving performance was evaluated in the driving simulator as well as on-road. The pass/fail SDSA equations of the original UK version of the SDSA were applied to predict the pass/fail outcome of participants’ driving evaluation. The SDSA predicted stroke participants’ simulator-based driving performance with 100% accuracy. The SDSA predicted PD participants’ simulator-based performance with 73% accuracy and the on-road performance with 82% accuracy. The accuracy with which driving performance of stroke and PD participants in this preliminary study was predicted by the US version of the SDSA is promising and informs the need for a larger study to better investigate and validate its predictive accuracy.