Investigating Cardiovascular Activation of Young Adults in Routine Driving

We report on a naturalistic study investigating the effects of routine driving on cardiovascular activation. We recruited 21 healthy young adults from a broad geographic area in the Southwestern United States. Using the participants' own smartphones and smartwatches, we monitored for a week both their driving and non-driving activities. Monitoring included the continuous recording of a) heart rate throughout the day, b) hand motion during driving as a proxy of persistent texting, and c) contextualized driving data, complete with traffic and weather information. These high temporal resolution variables were complemented with the drivers' biographic and psychometric profiles. Our analysis suggests that anxiety predisposition and high speeds are associated with significant cardiovascular activation on drivers, likely linked to sympathetic arousal. Surprisingly, these associations hold true under good weather, normal traffic, and with experienced drivers behind the wheel. The said findings call for attention to insidious effects of apparently benign drives even for people in their prime. Accordingly, our research contributes to intriguing new discourses on driving affect and personal health informatics.