Driving Simulator for Assessing Driving Skills of People with Multiple Sclerosis: a Pilot Study

Driving is a common activity with a significant impact on the quality of life since enables independence and fosters social activities. Nevertheless, driving is a rather complex task that requires different skills, such as physical abilities, proper judgement, risks perception / evaluation. Both these physical and cognitive abilities can be impaired after Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and can additionally be affected by the individual emotional state and disease progression. Driving simulators can be a good solution to assess and train driving skills of people with MS, but there are currently few studies focused on MS and driving ability. Moreover, they mostly aim at understanding driving performance impairments, mostly during monotonous highway drives. Here, we describe the framework of a new personalized driving simulator ADRIS 2.0, and the results of a first test on a group of unimpaired young adults and of a pilot test with three MS and sex and age-matched control subjects. Subjects trained with ADRIS 2.0 for a session of 30 minutes, driving through scenarios with different levels of difficulties. The system resulted easy to use and able to provide a realistic driving experience for all three groups of subjects. It also provided quantitative metrics that described MS drivers slower and prone to commit more infractions and collisions than control subjects. Thus, the developed simulator resulted well tolerated by all users, capable of detecting differences between control and MS subjects and its potential could be further exploited into the design of a personalized training of MS people.