Evaluation of Driving Ability of Elderly People Suffering White Matter Lesions by Experiments Using an Actual Vehicle

Abstract

White matter lesions are small areas of dead cells found in parts of the brain that act as connectors and minor cases are commonly found in the brains of the elder people. An actual vehicle driving experiment was executed to evaluate driving performances of the elderly drivers with and without white matter lesions in the same ages. Before the driving experiment, all of the subjects undertook dynamic vigilance checker (DVC) test, which is a kind of visual cognitive test. During the driving experiment, a calculating task given by voice, namely paced auditory serial addition test (PASAT), was imposed on drivers to examine the effect of the additional task on the driving performance. The results showed that the driver imposed with PASAT made more mistakes than that of the driver without PASAT, and the subject with white matter lesions is easier to be effected than the subjects without white matter lesions.