The same way a brain fit­ness soft­ware pro­gram can help increase dri­ving safety for older adults, sim­ple cog­ni­tive tests may help deter­mine whether a per­son can drive safely after a stroke.

A recent study ana­lyzed 30 pre­vi­ous stud­ies in which the par­tic­i­pants’ dri­ving skills after a stroke were tested in an on-road eval­u­a­tion. 1,728 indi­vid­u­als with an aver­age age of 61 were involved. On aver­age, 9 months had passed between the stroke and the dri­ving eval­u­a­tion. Note that 54 per­cent of the par­tic­i­pants passed the on-road evaluation.

The authors of the analy­sis looked for tests scores that could pre­dict the actual dri­ving eval­u­a­tion out­come. They iden­ti­fied 3 sim­ple cog­ni­tive tests that did quite well:

• a Road Sign Recog­ni­tion test (assess­ing traf­fic knowl­edge and visual comprehension)
• a Com­pass task (assess­ing visual-perceptual and visual-spatial abil­i­ties and men­tal speed)
• the Trail Mak­ing Test B (assess­ing visual-motor track­ing and visual scan­ning abilities)

Par­tic­i­pants’ scores in these tests cor­rectly pre­dicted whether the actual dri­ving test would be failed for 80 to 85 per­cent of the unsafe dri­vers. A very inter­est­ing alter­na­tive to time-consuming and expen­sive on-road tests.

Related arti­cles:

• Can Brain Fit­ness Inno­va­tion Enhance Cog­ni­tive Rehab and Dri­ving Safety?

• Why Brain Train­ing Helps Older Drivers

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