Assessment of stroke drivers' performance in a driving simulator: A pilot study results

Abstract

About 795,000 people experience a new or recurrent stroke in the United States each year and it is known that between 30% and 43% of the stroke survivors in the US resume driving within one year of the stroke incidence. In Korea, the stroke is the second leading cause of death and the incidence of stroke onset increases steadily. However, there are no guidelines for assessing driving performance for stroke patients yet. In this study, we developed an assessment environment using a driving simulator to evaluate driving performancce of stroke patients. The driving scenario consists of 3.5km urban traffic conditions (3 minutes), 10km divided 4-lane straight highway (6 minutes), and 7km 2-lane curved or hilly rural roads (6 minutes). Performance parameters during the simulated drive were automatically generated by the simulator software. The parameters included number of road edge excursions, centerline crossings, collisions, reaction time, and runtime. The stroke drivers’ performace was compared with healthy young drivers.