Sandra Winter, Ph.D., is a research assistant professor in the UF Department of Occupational Therapy (OT). She has been affiliated with the transportation program for various years, while working on a project developing a safe driving behaviors measure for older adults, which was funded by a grant from a 2007 USDOT University Transportation Center (UTC) located within the UFTI.
As an occupational therapist, Winter considers her association with the UFTI important because her work involves driving from the public health perspective, which takes into consideration how the built environment impacts a driver’s function and safety. She says the UFTI has the tools and resources to support this type of research.
“The infrastructure and collaborative opportunities UFTI provides foster research and dissemination so that the use of cutting edge technologies, such as driving simulators, can be more widely understood and applied,” she said.
Winter is currently working on a Department of Defense (DOD) sponsored project with the University of Florida and the Veteran’s Administration Hospital looking at driving difficulty in soldiers returning from combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Past research has revealed an increase in crashes or crash risk for military service members and combat veterans post-deployment. These difficulties are due in part to certain medical conditions such as traumatic brain injuries (TBI), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), orthopedic injuries or a combination of conditions known as polytrauma. The current pilot study that Winters is working on examines the usefulness of a simulator-based occupational therapy intervention for veterans experiencing driving issues post-deployment.
To evaluate the efficacy, Winter and her team will assess the driving performance in 60 subjects of which half will be randomized to receive the occupational therapy driving intervention or OT-DI and 30 subjects will be randomized to the control group and undergo a traffic safety education program of similar duration. The analysis will consist of looking at differences in the main dependent variable, the number of driving errors measured during two specially designed simulator drives, and outcomes such as real-world driving measured by state-recorded data on violations, citations and crashes.
“Our long-term objective is to refine a driving intervention protocol that is both efficacious and feasible for implementation in military and veteran health care settings,” Winter said. “In so doing, we will expand options for addressing driving difficulty in this vulnerable population.”