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Description:
The mission of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), an operating administration of the Department of Transportation (DOT), is to save lives, prevent injuries and reduce economic costs due to road traffic crashes, through education, research, safety standards and enforcement activity. In 2021, 8% of fatal crashes were distraction-affected crashes, with distracted driving motor vehicle crashes claiming 3,522 lives. Understanding which forms of technology can be used to study distracted driving effectively may help to decrease the number of crashes, injuries, and fatalities. The current project will focus on different forms of data collection, i.e., Naturalistic Driving Studies Data Acquisition Systems (NDS DAS) and smartphone-based telematic apps, analyzing the data collected in terms of accuracy at providing information, resources required for utilizing each technology, and ease of use and distribution (Study 1). The project will also involve analyzing the data collected using these two technologies in terms of distracted driving engagement according to participant sex and age (which will be analyzed using the current project’s data sets) (Study 2).
This project will include a literature review and scan of technologies that can be used for studying data collection of driver behavior and distracted driving engagement, followed by the naturalistic data collection study involving the two forms of technology. The data that is collected will be analyzed to compare the two technologies (Study 1) and according to sex and age in a 2 by 2 design (Study 2). It is anticipated that the design will involve at least one hundred twenty participants and data collection will take place for at least a period of one month (for each participant) to ensure sufficient data is available for examining the relevant behaviors. In addition, this project will have a distribution representative of the community from which the sample is drawn in terms of race and ethnicity.