The Effect Of Mobile Phone Use While Driving On Response Time: Driving Simulator Study

Abstract

Using driving simulator to assess mobile phones distraction on driving performance.• The response time is increased while using smart phones while driving. • The results indicate that the response time increases with task difficulty. • Young participants are less affected when compared with older people.Mobile phone use is one of the most common daily tasks and this is normal, however, this task could be problematic while driving. The use of mobile phones while driving has become a major cause of road accidents and poses a threat to public health. This study investigated the effect of mobile phone usage while driving on response time, as it investigated four mobile phone tasks (hands-free calling, hand calls, reading text messages, and sending text messages) in addition to basic driving. A total of 42 participants, ranging in age from (19 to 55), with a mean age (mean = 33.14, SD = 10.26) participated in the driving simulation at the University of Technology and all participants performed five tasks. The participants had to interact with voice commands by performing the throttle maneuver. The results concluded with a delay in response, which means an increase in cognitive reaction time when using a mobile phone compared to basic driving. It has also been found that the response time increases with the age of drivers.

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“…Research using driving simulators to evaluate user behavior has been developed over the years. These studies assess the effects caused by driving after drinking (Yadav and Velaga, 2019), using a cell phone while driving (Mutar, Abduljabbar and Mohammed, 2021), driver fatigue (Farahmand and Boroujerdian, 2018) and sleeping (Ahlström et al, 2018) in monotonous environments or evaluating the profile of drivers more prone to accidents according to age and gender (Scalco et al, 2022). Road conditions were also studied, such as visibility according to weather conditions (Chang et al, 2019), a crossover between vehicles (Difei et al, 2021) and traffic conditions in curves (Babić and Brijs, 2021).…”