Behind the wheel:

Smile: You’re on DriveCam

by Michele Regenold

You’ve just earned your ticket to freedom—your driver’s license—and a guy from the University of Iowa says, “Hey, can I put a video camera in your car?”

“That first talk to that group of teenagers was the hardest talk I’ve ever given in my life,” says Dan McGehee, director of the Human Factors & Vehicle Safety Research Division at the University of Iowa’s Public Policy Center.

McGehee’s goal was to recruit 25 new drivers from a small high school in rural Iowa to participate in his 2006 research on teen driving. He and his team wanted to see if a special “event triggered video system” could help teen drivers reduce their risk for crashes. He told them that

• The teens themselves would control when the system is triggered.
• The system would record only the 10 seconds before and after “safety-relevant” events, such as hard braking and fast turns.
• This was an opportunity for them to participate in research that had never been done before in such an objective, systematic way.

He also showed examples of video clips from DriveCam, the manufacturer (see the sample video above).

25 students at Clear Creek-Amana High School eventually signed up. Each participant in the research study

• was 16 or 17 years old,
• had from 3 months to 1 year of driving experience, and
• drove an average of 40 miles per day, mostly on rural highways and gravel roads.

Allison Momany, now 18 and a freshman at the University of Iowa, was one of the first teens to sign on. She grew up in a family that values research, she said. The $25 per month and a chance to win 1 of 2 iPods didn’t hurt either.

Video system in teens’ vehicles

For about 13 months, beginning in March 2006, the participating teens drove with the DriveCam video system installed behind the rearview mirror of their vehicles. The system contains 2 cameras, one aimed out the windshield and the other aimed inside the vehicle.

During the first 2 months, the cameras collected baseline data about each driver. The teen drivers in the study were not alerted when they triggered the system, and they received no feedback about their driving during this phase.

For the next 6 months, the teens received 2 kinds of feedback on their driving:

• immediate feedback from the camera itself and
• weekly video report cards.

A light on the bottom of the camera blinked when drivers did something that triggered the system. Sometimes this caught good maneuvers, like swerving to avoid someone or stopping for a yellow light that’s about to turn red, and sometimes not so good.

The camera caught Allison Momany putting her hair up. She was driving with her knee, her knee slipped, and she had to pull the steering wheel back really fast. She also went around corners too fast. “The little red light would start blinking at me,” she jokes, “and I’d tell it ‘No, that’s not fast enough.’”

The weekly video report card included that week’s video and charts comparing each teen’s driving performance and seatbelt use to everyone else’s in the study. Parents were encouraged to watch and discuss the video with their teens.

Effects of feedback on teens’ driving    

According to the baseline data McGehee collected at the beginning of the study, the teens fell into 2 distinct groups, low-frequency and high-frequency. 18 teens averaged 2.8 “safety-relevant events” per 1,000 miles (low-frequency group). The other 6 teen drivers (1 was dropped from the analysis) averaged 18.8 events per 1,000 miles (high-frequency group).

After the 40-week feedback part of the study, the low-frequency group averaged 2.0 events per 1,000 miles. This group didn’t change its behavior much, McGehee said. But the high-frequency group made major changes. After 18 weeks of feedback, they dropped to an average of 2.7 events per 1,000 miles—an 86% drop.

But does the change in driving behavior last?

To find out, McGehee left the video system in the teens’ vehicles for a final 8 weeks, but he took away the feedback. The system didn’t alert drivers in real time that they’d triggered it, nor did McGehee send video report cards. Even without that feedback, all of the teens maintained a low number of safety-relevant events.

As a result of the feedback, Allison Momany says, “I made a lot of changes, especially with slowing down. I learned a lot about watching other drivers. Lots of events happen because of other drivers. You learn to really pay attention and look further ahead.”

McGehee says this video intervention technology “really shows the student and the parent the context of the error or good response. It helps you understand what happened at that moment. Other technologies don’t provide that vital context.”

FYI

McGehee is currently studying teen drivers in an urban environment, Eagan, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. All 35 teens in the study are brand new, 16-year-old drivers with 0 to 1 month of driving experience.

American Family Insurance, which sponsored McGehee’s basic research on rural teens at a cost of about $500,000, now offers free video systems to insurance policy holders in several Midwestern states. See this website for more info about the program: http://www.teensafedriver.com/.

Talk back

Would you want to try using this type of feedback to help your driving? Why or why not? Email the editor (editor@go-explore-trans.com) your thoughts, or post a comment on this article (you need to have an “enhanced” subscription to post comments).