Assessing Chinese coach drivers’ fitness to drive: The development of a toolkit based on cognition measurements

Abstract

Road traffic accidents resulting in group deaths and injuries are often related to coach drivers’ inappropriate operations and behaviors. Thus, the evaluation of coach drivers’ fitness to drive is an important measure for improving the safety of public transportation. Previous related research focused on drivers’ age and health condition. Comprehensive studies about commercial drivers’ cognitive capacities are limited. This study developed a toolkit consisting of nine cognition measurements across driver perception/sensation, attention, and reaction. A total of 1413 licensed coach drivers in Jiangsu Province, China were investigated and tested. Results indicated that drivers with accident history within three years performed overwhelmingly worse (p<0.001) on dark adaptation, dynamic visual acuity, depth perception, attention concentration, attention span, and significantly worse (p<0.05) on reaction to complex tasks compared with drivers with clear accident records. These findings supported that in the assessment of fitness to drive, cognitive capacities are sensitive to the detection of drivers with accident proneness. We first developed a simple evaluation model based on the percentile distribution of all single measurements, which defined the normal range of “fit-to-drive” by eliminating a 5% tail of each measurement. A comprehensive evaluation model was later constructed based on the kernel principal component analysis, in which the eliminated 5% tail was calculated from on integrated index. Methods to categorizing qualified, good, and excellent coach drivers and criteria for evaluating and training Chinese coach drivers’ fitness to drive were also proposed.