A recently awarded grant from the National Institutes of Health will support a joint Emory Eye Center-Georgia Tech investigation of driver safety for people who have glaucoma.
The project, Piloting Augmented Reality Cues for Enhancing Driving Safety in Glaucoma
was conceived by Emory Eye Center researcher and clinician, Deepta Ghate, MD, and her colleague, Srinivas Peeta, PhD, who heads up the Autonomous & Connected Transportation (ACT) Lab at Georgia Tech.
Their joint project received a $50,000 award from NIH's Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) - a program that promotes the efficient transformation of laboratory-borne science into innovations and interventions that improve individual and public health.
We are excited to be able to support Dr. Ghate's partnership with Georgia Tech,
said Emory Eye Center director and F. Phinizy Calhoun, Sr. Chair of Ophthalmology, Dr. Allen Beck, himself, a glaucoma specialist.
Dr. Ghate is performing the kind of translational research that can have a positive impact on the lives of glaucoma patients. We are so happy to have her on our faculty.
Ultimately, Ghate and Peeta seek to improve driving safety for individuals with peripheral vision loss - a problem that affects 13 percent of the population over 65 years of age. Drivers with glaucoma have been found to be three to five times more likely to be in a motor vehicle accident.
Ghate's previous research found that drivers with glaucoma are less able to deal with distractions while driving as compared to elderly people without glaucoma.
We believe that technology that cues road hazards - which is routine in many newer cars - may hamper elderly people with glaucoma rather than help. They may get distracted by the noise and the lights and, thus, make more mistakes while driving,
said Ghate, whose Glaucoma and Visual Psychophysics Lab will take a lead role in the research.
This funding is essential to identifying new solutions. It will fund scenario development in the simulator in Dr. Peeta's lab and generate pilot data for a larger study.
The joint research project will evaluate which glaucoma patients may benefit from augmented reality (AR) cues. It will also seek to identify which driving tasks may be best communicated using AR cues, Ghate said.
We will also evaluate which AR cuing modality - auditory or visual - works best for glaucoma drivers. We aim to evaluate the impact of visual and auditory AR cues on hazard detection and driving performance. We will also evaluate predictor variables for successful hazard detection in glaucoma and control subjects.
-Kathleen E. Moore