Driving Us Crazy

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Currently, most state DMVs will call in any driver for assessment who has been reported to them by a police officer, a physician, a relative or any other concerned citizen. As a last resort, some adult children feel compelled to report their own parents. (Six states allow anonymous reporting.) Some complain that their parents' doctors are too timid about intervention. Linda Bryant, an administrative assistant in Orlando, Fla., was incensed when an eye doctor told her 76-year-old father that he was fine to drive. "I wrote the doctor," she says, "that if and when the accident happened, I'd send the victims to his doorstep as his liability."

Many new methods for assessing drivers are just now entering the market. Some are getting their first use at nonprofit senior-safety centers, whose numbers have expanded following the Santa Monica watershed. Florida has been at the forefront, having established five prototype driver-assessment centers in different cities. Each center uses DriveABLE, a system for examining drivers who are cognitively impaired because of dementia or complications of such medical conditions as stroke or diabetes.

DriveABLE was originally developed by Canadian neuropsychologist Allen Dobbs to help guide physicians in making driving-fitness decisions about patients with dementia. In a preliminary two-year study, Dobbs tested the performance of three groups of drivers: Alzheimer's patients, normal 65-and-older people and 30-to-40-year-olds. He found that the cognitively impaired drivers made different kinds of errors from normal drivers--errors that could prove deadly. He then created DriveABLE to help evaluators identify the most dangerous drivers.

The Senior Resource Center in Orlando was the first in the U.S. to be licensed to use the DriveABLE method. Aided by touch-screen computers, drivers are evaluated on judgment, decision making and attention shifting. Next, on a 40-min. road test--always the same course--a driving instructor marks each error a driver makes. A computer program then separates normal errors, like forgetting to signal a turn, from abnormal ones, like stopping at a green light. At the Orlando center, about 70% of those tested so far--many of them referred because of Alzheimer's--have failed. About 20% have been given remediation, which may include anything from larger rear-view mirrors for the car to cataract surgery for the driver.

Another assessment tool being developed is the driving simulator. An interactive simulator created by Northeastern University engineering professor Ron Mourant is currently being used at the University of Virginia's Driving Safety Laboratory. Equipped with a bucket seat and real car controls, the simulator offers drivers a virtual-reality road test. Some experts are worried that seniors' unfamiliarity with the high-tech setting may affect results, but others argue that simulators can project dangerous scenarios that would be unsafe on the road. Mourant views the simulator as a tool of persuasion: to help older drivers see their weaknesses and voluntarily stop driving.