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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2010

The beneficial effects of a simulator-based training on the elderly pedestrian safety

Résumé

International accident statistics indicate that elderly pedestrians make up an extremely vulnerable road-user group. Past research has shown that older adults have trouble taking the speed of approaching vehicles into account in deciding whether or not to cross the street: contrary to younger pedestrians, older adults make many unsafe decisions when vehicles are approaching at high speeds and miss safe opportunities to cross when vehicles approach slowly. Although for many seniors, walking is the major way of getting around, there are surprisingly no studies on improving the safety of elderly pedestrians through training. The present study was aimed at contributing to this issue. Our objective was to develop and assess the effectiveness of a training program that combined educational and behavioral interventions. To this end, 20 seniors were enrolled in a simulator-based streetcrossing training program and 20 other seniors were assigned to the control group (internet-use training). Before the training, immediately after it, and 6 months later, the street-crossing decisions of the 40 older participants were assessed using a simulated street-crossing task. Twenty younger participants performed the same task to serve as a baseline against which the performance of the older trained group was compared. The results showed that the training produced significant short- and long-term benefits and enhanced the overall safety of the experimental participants' street-crossing decisions. In view of applying our method, it would be important to separate the effects of educational training (explicit feedback; training instructions) and repeated practice in crossing the street on the simulator. A partial answer to this question can be found by looking at the results of the control group, whose performance improved with task repetition in such a way that on the long-term followup test, no significant difference was found between the two groups. More generally, these findings suggest that combining repeated simulator-based street-crossing practice with enhanced awareness (acquired explicitly or implicitly) of street-crossing dangers has a positive effect. When compared with the younger participants, the older participants of the experimental group considerably improved their behavior so that age-related differences in the mean safety-related indicators were no longer observed after training. However, the older participants' ability to take the oncoming car's speed into account in their decisions did not improve with training. This finding may reflect age-related sensory and cognitive difficulties that cannot be remedied by a behavioral or educational method. Further studies are therefore required to identify the sensory, perceptual, and cognitive abilities involved in street-crossing decisionmaking. A better understanding of these skills would be useful in designing future cognitive training programs likely to improve the behavior of senior pedestrians. street-crossing; aging; training; simulator

Domaines

Psychologie
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Dates et versions

hal-00615267 , version 1 (18-08-2011)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-00615267 , version 1

Citer

Aurélie Dommes, Viola Cavallo. The beneficial effects of a simulator-based training on the elderly pedestrian safety. TRANSED 2010, 12th International Conference on Mobility and Transport for Elderly and Disabled Persons, Jun 2010, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR China. 10p. ⟨hal-00615267⟩
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