Abstract
Aging has been progressing quite rapidly in the world, therefore the increase in traffic accidents due to driver aging may become an international problem in the future. In order to let each individual elderly driver continue to operate vehicle safely and not to abandon driving, one needs driving support appropriate for a particular elderly driver's driving capability. We propose a method to evaluate their driving capability by tracking each individual aged person. During the investigation period spanning almost a decade, we measured the driving ability at every three-year interval for a group of elderly drivers that continue to operate vehicles. We take into consideration their natural deterioration of driving skill to build a model. Based on this model, we observe how the change in the driving skill causes our model to give various readings. Our results show that proposed model fit better with estimations when elderly drivers continue to operate their own vehicles than with when elderly drivers gave up driving. Thus, the proposed method is effective in evaluating the driving skill based on the aging of the operating capacity of elderly drivers.
