Date Presented 04/21/2023
Driving is a critical instrumental activity of daily living and demands multitasking. Multitasking declines with age and certain medical conditions. An innovative multitasking assessment demonstrated significant differences between medically at-risk drivers and healthy controls.
Primary Author and Speaker: Alec Ducharme
Additional Authors and Speakers: Meagan T. Denny, Anne E. Dickerson
Contributing Authors: Meagan T. Denny, Anne E. Dickerson
PURPOSE: Driving requires multitasking for simultaneous attention and decision making along with actions to physically execute those decisions. Multitasking is a skill that decreases with age and with certain medical conditions. Common assessments of multitasking have inconsistent ability to predict fitness to drive or driver safety. New technologies present an opportunity to improve assessment of multitasking to assist in fitness to drive assessments.
DESIGN: A cross-sectional design was used to compare multitasking ability between medically-at-risk adult drivers and healthy controls. Medically-at-risk adults completed a comprehensive driving evaluation with a driving outcome of pass, fail, or drive with restrictions. Healthy drivers were from a convenience sample and completed the same program with scores.
METHOD: DriveSafety’s Functional Object Detection (FOD) program was used to assess multitasking ability; specifically, does multitasking performance differ 1) across age groups, and 2) between medically-at-risk and healthy controls? Six levels of increasing difficulty were used on the FOD task which included: braking, identifying objects, maintaining speed and lane position, and identifying numbers that appear in the mirrors. Performance within each level on the different tasks was automatically quantified and we converted them to a composite score.
RESULTS: Independent t-tests demonstrated that there was a significant difference between medically-at-risk and controls’ performance on 3 levels (p<.005), demonstrating decreased multitasking ability between medically-at-risk individuals and healthy controls.
CONCLUSION: Results being consistent with the literature further validated this tool as a measure of multitasking. Data collection continues to address the question of age differences and produce ROC curves to help practitioners evaluate fitness to drive. Multitasking is a critical component of fitness to drive and can be tested with an occupation-based activity (driving simulator). As such, general OT practitioners can quickly determine whether further assessment for driving evaluation is needed. In addition, this occupational therapy-based assessment will highlight the distinct value of occupational therapy to other health care providers.
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