COMPARISON OF A NOVEL, NATURALISTIC DRIVING ASSESSMENT SYSTEM WITH SELF-REPORTED DRIVING BEHAVIOR IN A SAMPLE OF COGNITIVELY NORMAL OLDER ADULTS

Changes in driving behavior among older drivers has become an increasing area of public and research interest as older adults continue to drive longer. Controlled conditions like on-the-road tests and driving simulators evaluate driving ability in clinical populations and older adults, but are limited in understanding daily driving behavior. Existing research that measure naturalistic driving behavior are often expensive, obtrusive, require extensive modifications to a vehicle and involve cumbersome download procedures. To address this gap in research technology, we developed a new methodology including, data acquisition, curation and archiving procedures, and wrote custom computer codes (using R and ArcGIS) to modify a commercial off the shelf global positioning system (GPS) solution for our own use. We then conducted a pilot study to assess the degree to which our naturalistic driving system was associated with self-reported driving behavior among older adults with and without preclinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Participants (N=20) with normal cognition (Clinical Dementia Rating, 0), aged 65 years and older were recruited from the Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center. Participants completed a clinical assessment and psychometric battery, brain amyloid imaging, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) collection. Driving behavior was evaluated using the self-report, Driving Habits Questionnaire (DHQ) and by our system, which incorporated, a GPS device plugged into participant’s vehicle. We examined correlations between five main outcomes collected by both methods: speeding, driving space, total miles driven, total number of trips, and number of days-per-week driven. Group differences were also examined on the five outcomes between those with lower and higher biomarker variables. There were statistically significant correlation (p ≤.05) between both instruments on total miles driven (r=.83), between number of trips and total miles driven (r=.57) and number of trips and days-per-week driven (r=.48). Participants with lower amyloid imaging biomarkers had a higher number of trips with speeding, total miles driven, total number of trips and number of days-per-week driven. Participants more accurately report global driving behavior but less so for specific day-to-day driving behaviors. Further work is needed to determine the association between biomarkers of preclinical AD, self-report driving behavior and, naturalistic driving outcomes.