Psychology

The DriveSafety driving simulator is used to evaluate brain functions relating to driver fitness and other complex Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL). Common sources of distress are problems with relationships, career and family conflicts, physical illness, work stress, substance abuse and addiction, and the anxiety and depression that can accompany these challenges.

 

Psychologists study human experience and behavior. Neuropsychologists study, assess, understand, and treat brain-behavior relationships. These professions seeks to understand how the brain, through structure and neural networks, produces and controls behavior and mental processes, including emotions, personality, thinking, learning and remembering, problem solving, consciousness, as well as the physiological processes.

 

Driving is something most people do on a regular basis. The driver’s mental processes and underlying behavior involve perception, learning process, problem solving, memory, attention, and emotion from inputs from the vehicle and external to the vehicle. Human conditions and emotions have a direct impact on driving, such as how they deal with: 

The DriveSafety driving simulator is used to evaluate brain functions relating to driver fitness and other complex Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL). It can be considered “the treadmill for the brain” and may be used for assessment, treatment and practice of visuo-spatial and attentional skills and abilities. The scenarios will be developed for specific medical conditions, with the underlying purpose of entailing features in the scenario that specifically map to perceptual, cognitive, and motor-control performance abilities to sensitively detect impairments of brain functioning such as memory, visual processing speed, divided attention, judgment and so forth. This will produce functional outcomes and allow for the development of individualized patient care pathways.

 

Driving simulation provides clinicians with a modern system to evaluate perceptual, cognitive and motor-control abilities. Assessment of these abilities will help guide medical decision-making for further testing, functional outcomes, interventions or advice for other complex tasks and occupations (besides driving) that rely on sort term memory, divided attention, visual processing speed, spatial orientation and situational awareness. Driving simulation is a system level, functional test which combines component functions into an integrated, dynamic performance test to see how well patients perform and react “under the pressure of time.”

 

Conditions which lend themselves to the driving simulator include stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Traumatic Brain Injury, Sleep Apnea, end stage liver and renal disease, and general age-related issues.

 

The DriveSafety CDS clinical driving simulator explores a range of sensory, cognitive and motor abilities including:

Unlike static individual component neuropsychological tests, the CDS simulator is a dynamic functional performance test, which requires simultaneous processing of many different cognitive functions in an integrated manner.

 

The turn-key CDS driving simulator is based on an actual car – a Ford Focus – giving all parties some face validation. The CDS Scenarios suite of virtual drives provide the OT and the patients a variety of driving situations including residential, suburban, urban, rural, industrial and freeway as well as various lighting (bright sunlight to dark nighttime) and weather conditions (clear, foggy, snowy). The virtual driving scenarios range from simple, adaptation drives and limited complexity to transitional drives that involved multiple real-world driving settings and various environmental factors. There are enough of them to avoid the clients from memorizing them. The driving scenarios are designed in accordance with AASHTO, MUTCD and ADED best practices for delivery of driver rehabilitation services.

 

The administrative interface is intuitive – the administrator can begin running virtual practice drives immediately. The administrator has the ability to play-back the patients’ practice drives, allowing the OT to point out to the patient the positive and negative behaviors and for the patient to learning and gain additional insight.

 

A suite of virtual drives involving a variety of common driving situations allows the therapists or clinicians to see their patients in a series of driving environments, from the simple to the complex.

 

 

 

 

 

·         Neuropsychological Rehabilitation