Supporting New Teen Drivers During Independent Driving

September 11, 2014

About the Presentation

A Teen Driver Support System (TDSS) has been developed by the University of Minnesota to address behaviors that influence the unacceptably high crash rate among teenagers by providing critical assistance to inexperienced drivers and enabling parents to monitor their children’s driving habits effectively. The TDSS, based on a teen’s smartphone, provides real-time, in-vehicle feedback to the teen about risky driving behavior and immediately communicates (via text messages) with parents if the behavior continues. Speeding, aggressive driving, cellular phone use, and stop sign violations are some behaviors the system monitors or prevents.

This presentation provided an overview of the system as well as a look at the preliminary results of a 12-month field operational test involving 300 newly licensed teen drivers in Minnesota.

Webcast

About the Speaker

Janet Creaser is a research fellow in the HumanFIRST Laboratory and a research scholar at the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota. She has 14 years of experience conducting transportation research in Canada and the United States, with an emphasis on examining driver behavior and developing technology interventions to support driver safety and mobility. Her research capitalizes on the use of driving simulation as a safe and effective method for the design, development, and evaluation of in-vehicle systems as well as the use of instrumented vehicles for on-road testing and evaluations of driver behavior and in-vehicle systems.