Automobile crashes are the leading cause of death for those aged 3 to 33, with 43,005 (118 per day) Americans killed in 2002 alone. Seat belt use reduces the risk of serious injury in an accident, and refraining from using a cell phone while driving reduces the risk of an accident. Cell phone use while driving increases accident rates, and leads to 2,600 U.S. fatalities each year. An active pro...

Objective It is generally believed that professional drivers can manage quite severe fatigue before routine driving performance is affected. In addition, there are results indicating that professional drivers can adapt to prolonged night shifts and may be able to learn to drive without decreased performance under high levels of sleepiness. However, very little research has been conducted to com...

Objective: We investigated the impacts of drivers’ socio-demographic factors on these lane-changing models, and developed Fuzzy logic-based lane-changing models associated the drivers’ demographic factors. Methods: Forty drivers were recruited for a driving simulator test to collect their driving behaviors of changing lane in a work zone with/without the aid of Driver’s Smart Advisory System (D...

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have largely been developed with a "one-size-fits-all" approach. This approach neglects the large inter-individual variability in perceptual and cognitive abilities that affect aging ADAS users. We investigated the effectiveness of a forward collision warning (FCW) with fixed response parameters in young and older drivers with differing levels of cognit...

OBJECTIVES To obtain detailed information on patterns of driver cell phone use, including how often drivers talk and text, the extent to which they use hands-free devices, and knowledge of and reaction to state cell phone laws. METHODS Telephone surveys were conducted with 1219 drivers in the 48 contiguous U.S. states and the District of Columbia, using random samples of landline and cell pho...