The New Zealand Government is strongly focused on better, smarter, faster public services delivering what the customer needs. Significant change is occurring, including machinery of government changes. To support this, many departments are re-evaluating their strategies and their use of KPIs, benchmarking and the balanced scorecard. These tools, used appropriately, provide insight to track stra...

In the current study we examined the relationship between drivers’ eye movement patterns and driving performance in a dual-task driving paradigm. Drivers performed two tasks in a driving simulator. In a car following task, drivers were asked to maintain a constant headway from a leading vehicle as it varied its speed. In the second task (light detection task), drivers tried to detect changes in...

Power wheelchair users may present secondary impairments that inhibit effective joystick control. Accordingly, driving assessments are needed to ensure the safety of both the drivers and their surroundings. We introduce a quantitative method to evaluate power wheelchair driving performance using the Markov decision process. Our dynamic, stochastic approach supplements previous quantitative eval...

We investigated the potential for predicting driving performance of a United States (US)-based population of participants using an adapted version of the Stroke Drivers’ Screening Assessment (SDSA) battery. Participants included seven first-ever stroke survivors (age 51±8 years) and 11 individuals with Hoehn & Yahr Stage 2 or 3 Parkinson’s disease (PD) (age 65±8 years). We adapted the original ...

BACKGROUND Cataract surgery is one of the most common medical procedures undertaken worldwide. AIMS To investigate whether cataract surgery can improve driving performance and whether this can be predicted by changes in visual function. METHODS 29 older patients with bilateral cataracts and 18 controls with normal vision were tested. All were licensed drivers. Driving and vision performance...

Concern over older driver high traffic fatality rates has resulted in an effort to identify risk factors and to develop methods of assessment. This study examines two attention-related tasks, Useful Field of View (UFOV) and Change Blindness (CB), in relation to vision and cognitive test batteries and driving performance measures collected using a simulator and an instrumented vehicle. Eight old...

The objective of the current study was to assess the separate and combined effects of marijuana and alcohol on actual driving performance. Eighteen subjects were treated with drugs and placebo according to a balanced, 6-way, crossover design. On separate evenings they were given weight calibrated Delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) doses of 0, 100 and 200 &mgr;g/kg with and without an alcohol d...

Pregabalin, a novel agent for treating partial epilepsy and peripheral neuropathic and central pain, was studied for its effect on driving performance in healthy volunteers. Sixteen healthy male volunteers who drove regularly were enrolled in a double-blind, parallel-group, placebo-controlled study assessing the effect of pregabalin on driving performance. Subjects received an oral dose of preg...

Purpose To examine the associations between nighttime driving performance of older drivers and photopic, mesopic, and glare-based tests of visual function. Methods Participants included 26 older drivers (71.8 ± 6.3 years), with minimal or no eye disease, but who reported vision-related nighttime driving difficulties. Nighttime driving performance was assessed on a closed-road circuit, which i...