Insur­ance com­pany All­state and brain fit­ness soft­ware devel­oper Posit Sci­ence just announced (see press release Pro­tect­ing Penn­syl­va­nia Dri­vers, One Brain at a Time) a very intel­li­gent initiative:

Video exer­cises aid dri­ving skills (Chicago Tribune)

-“All­state, which called the Posit pro­gram “poten­tially the next big break­through in auto­mo­bile safety,” said it expects its soft­ware exer­cises to reduce risky dri­ving maneu­vers by up to 40 per­cent and improve stop­ping dis­tance by an aver­age of 22 feet when trav­el­ing at 55 miles per hour.”

-“We’ll look to see whether over the next six to nine months there will be a reduc­tion in” the num­ber of acci­dents between the group par­tic­i­pat­ing in the video exer­cises and those sit­ting out, said Tom War­den, assis­tant vice pres­i­dent of Allstate’s research and plan­ning center.

I am for­tu­nate to inter­view Tom War­den, Assis­tant Vice Pres­i­dent and Leader of Allstate’s Research and Plan­ning Cen­ter, based in Menlo Park, California.

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Tom, thank you for your time. Can you please explain the con­text behind this new ini­tia­tive that you just announced?

Tom War­den: Our research cen­ter is con­stantly look­ing for new ideas to improve the dri­ving behav­ior of dri­vers of all ages. Recently we have paid extra empha­sis on ways to improve the safety of older drivers.

Let me pro­vide some back­ground here. All­state, as a com­pany, has always been one of the pio­neers in help­ing to intro­duce new safety mea­sures. For exam­ple, we were among the pio­neers in the 60s to advo­cate for manda­tory use of seat­ing belts, given research stud­ies on the ben­e­fits for dri­vers and pas­sen­gers alike. More recently, we helped lobby for wider adop­tion of airbags, an effec­tive but expen­sive way of pro­tec­tion that only became main­stream when man­u­fac­tur­ers were required to include them.

Let’s talk now about your agree­ment with Posit Sci­ence. What will hap­pen over the next months?

The first thing we are doing is to con­duct a research study to ana­lyze the real-life impact of Posit Sci­ence InSight, a computer-based cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­gram, on acci­dent rates. We know that as dri­vers get older, espe­cially in their 70s and beyond, a num­ber of cog­ni­tive prob­lems can get in the way of safe dri­ving. We want to see if there is a way to reduce this effect.

We are offer­ing the InSight pro­gram for free to over 100,000 auto policy-holders in Penn­syl­va­nia aged 50–75, and to some poten­tial clients. We rec­om­mend par­tic­i­pants to devote at least 10 hours to the train­ing exer­cises, but of course the more they can devote the bet­ter. We will com­pare the results with a con­trol group.

How will you mea­sure suc­cess, and by when will you know if your expec­ta­tions are met?

Given that we have already started recruit­ing par­tic­i­pants and train­ing may start as soon as next week, we may have some inter­est­ing results by the end of March 2009 or per­haps dur­ing the sum­mer. In order to have sta­tis­ti­cally mean­ing­ful num­bers, we will have to see how many peo­ple enroll in the study and the size of the observed impact.
We will ana­lyze the pro­gram com­pli­ance rates since this type of inter­ven­tion needs to be engag­ing enough for peo­ple to devote a num­ber of hours to at home. But, at the end of the day, what we want to see is whether using the pro­gram will trans­late into lower acci­dent rates and bet­ter safety.

Assum­ing those goals are met, what would be the next steps?

In that case we will have to fig­ure out ways to roll out the pro­gram nation­wide, per­haps even offer­ing dis­counts to policy-holders who com­mit to using the program.  We would also engage in pub­lic advo­cacy, share the results, part­ner with the DMV and other agencies.

But, we have not really con­tem­plated this yet, we need to see the results first.

The InSight pro­gram is a pretty spe­cial­ized pro­gram. It does not train all main cog­ni­tive skills involved in dri­ving, such as say work­ing mem­ory or divided atten­tion, but focuses mostly on visual pro­cess­ing. Are you con­duct­ing some type of inde­pen­dent cog­ni­tive assess­ment to iden­tify who may ben­e­fit from that pro­gram vs. other options?

No, we are not. We became inter­ested in talk­ing to Posit Sci­ence after they acquired Visual Aware­ness, the com­pany that had devel­oped the Use­ful Field of View (UFOV) tech­nol­ogy. We felt Kar­lene Ball and her team brought the kind of research that stood up to our stan­dards and held the most promise to meet our needs.

What was the main busi­ness case to embark on a pio­neer­ing ini­tia­tive like this?

As I said ear­lier, All­state has a long tra­di­tion of intro­duc­ing safety-related mea­sures, and this ini­tia­tive reflects that com­mit­ment. In this case, our objec­tive goes even beyond dri­ver safety: we want to help our clients. We want to con­tribute to their over­all qual­ity of life and pro­tec­tion. We believe that pro­grams like InSight can con­tribute to bet­ter daily func­tion­ing and qual­ity of life. We want our clients to have pos­i­tive feel­ings towards All­state and to know we care about them.

A poten­tial con­cern we have heard in sim­i­lar cases, where an insur­ance com­pany offered a computer-based assess­ment or train­ing pro­gram, is Pri­vacy. How can users of InSight who are also All­state pol­icy hold­ers know that what­ever infor­ma­tion the pro­gram gath­ers can­not be used against them, for exam­ple to deny cov­er­age or increase premiums?

That’s a great ques­tion. We are aware of that poten­tial con­cern, and we are putting processes in place so that All­state doesn’t get access to any cog­ni­tive infor­ma­tion on a par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­ual. The Posit Sci­ence pro­gram is gath­er­ing the infor­ma­tion, and Posit Sci­ence will only share data with us at an aggre­gated level, for over­all research pur­poses. All­state will be com­pletely blind as to who uses the program.

A cou­ple of final ques­tions on related inno­va­tion areas. One: given that med­ica­tions can con­tribute to the cog­ni­tive impair­ments in older dri­vers that you are try­ing to address, are there ini­tia­tives under­way to bet­ter mea­sure and explain those to seniors –and their doc­tors? Sec­ond: All­state has been aggres­sively pro­mot­ing a Parent-Teen Dri­ving Con­tract to con­tribute to the safety of teenage dri­vers. Another cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­gram, called Dri­ve­Fit, is being used by hun­dreds of dri­ving schools in Canada and Europe. Are you con­sid­er­ing a sim­i­lar research study to reduce acci­dent rates among teenagers?

On the first ques­tion, that is indeed a major prob­lem. Med­ica­tion can impair cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing, and of course as we get older we usu­ally get more of them, which can con­tribute to dri­ving prob­lems. Unfor­tu­nately, I am not aware of any major ini­tia­tive to deal with that prob­lem from a com­pre­hen­sive perspective.

On the sec­ond one, it is clear that teenagers face spe­cific chal­lenges when start­ing to drive, before they get the needed expe­ri­ence and abil­i­ties to process infor­ma­tion and to man­age risks. We are always look­ing for ways to increase the safety in our roads, so that type of project would cer­tainly fall within the scope of our inter­ests, but for now we chose to focus on help­ing older dri­vers drive more safely and improve their qual­ity of life. Given demo­graphic real­i­ties, we really need to explore options there as soon as we can.

Any final remarks for our read­ers to under­stand the sig­nif­i­cance of your agreement?

We believe this pro­gram has the poten­tial to lower acci­dent rates and improve the qual­ity of life of mil­lions of adults. We are excited to be able to offer it to our policy-holders, to show our com­mit­ment to inno­va­tion and to their over­all pro­tec­tion and well-being. We are hope­ful that, if the results are as pos­i­tive as we believe they can be, inter­ven­tions like this can become a major new safety ben­e­fit, and that it may pos­i­tively reflect on AllState’s brand and pub­lic perception.

Tom, thank you very much for your time. We will be very inter­ested in learn­ing more about the ongo­ing progress of this initiative.

Thank you.

—

Note: the inter­view above has been edited for clar­ity and read­abil­ity pur­poses. It is not a ver­ba­tim transcript.

If you want to learn more about the topic, you will enjoy these related articles:

- Improv­ing Dri­ving Skills and Brain Func­tion­ing– Inter­view with ACTIVE’s Jerri Edwards
- Dri­ve­Fit (by Cog­niFit); Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram for Driving

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