Use of Cell Phone while Driving results serious injury

I have submitted a research very similar to the above topics at Elsevier.com for the journal of “Safety Research”. But this writing is totally different than what we did. Here I am mentioning about the impacts of cell phone on drivers. From our study with eye tracking system, it was vivid that the sharing of attention among the primary and secondary task of driving greatly affect the visual behavior of the driver. The equipment used in our original study included a driving simulator, an eye tracking system, digital video cameras, computers, and cellular phones.
Here I am trying to mention the incidence rate and visual blindness due to dual task of driving to create awareness to my reader so that they will not use cell phone during driving. Enclosed are the main points of my study.
Although driving a vehicle seems like a simple, routine activity to most of people, lack of attention and distraction while driving can result in serious life threatening accidents. Our visual senses are loaded the most during driving as they continuously gather information from car controls, roadways signs and warnings, other vehicles on the road and their behavior. In addition to information from these primary stimuli, various other in-vehicle technologies such as cellular telephones, vehicle equipment, entertainment and navigation systems, compete for the drivers’ visual attention. While these supplementary devices are designed for drivers’ convenience, they may cause distraction resulting in serious car crashes. Based on the recently published data by National Center of Statistics and Analysis (NCSA) for National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 2008 , distraction during driving was estimated to account for 19% of overall vehicular crashes (1,100,000 out of 5,811,000). The classification based on types of crashes showed that inattention caused 16 % of fatal crashes (5331 out of 34071), 21 % of injury crashes (350,000 out of 1,630,000), and 18% of property damage only crashes (745,000 out of 4,146,000) (NHTSA, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2009).
The use of cell phones while driving is widespread and likely to become even more pervasive as cell phone popularity continues to grow. According to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA–The Wireless Association), the total estimated wireless mobile subscribers were 286,646,191 in 2009 and it is projected that the subscribers will have skyrocketed at 348.6 million in 2013 [Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association-2009].

During high traffic and complex situation of additional traffic signs and symbols, the mental workload is increased and thus drivers are less able to maintain required situation awareness. Hence if a driver continues telephonic conversation while driving in a more complex traffic situation, the addition of mental workload and visual inattention may result to an increased likelihood of crashes. Based on the model of human control and behavior by Rasmussen, training in a particular task like driving moves the activities such as operation of controls from the knowledge or rule-based levels towards the skill-based level. This causes a reduction in mental/cognitive workload required for the operations involved in the driving task.

The dual task of driving while phoning causes the following facts:

1) The driving speed is decreased when the driving talking in cell phone. Drivers exhibited faster speeds at the beginning of the lead-vehicle brake event, relative to the baseline condition which may indicate that drivers diverted their attention away from speed monitoring while engaged in phone conversation

2) The dual task – driving and conversation on cell phone causes the increment of lane position variation from the center. In addition, this dual task decrease the number of times drivers changed lanes


3) The effect of conversation significantly causes steering variability and hence originates lane deviation. The rate of steering corrections that the driver has to make in order to retain the desired lane position was decreased due to the increased distraction

4) Generally female without dual task exhibit better driving performance than male but when they are engaged with dual task- driving while conversing in cell phone show evidence of worse driving performance than male.

5) Some researchers demonstrated that age was an examined variable significantly related to phone conversation task performance, with younger individuals performing better than older individuals. In a field study, the researchers showed that dual task of conversation with cell phone during driving exhibited a significantly slower Braking Response Time (BRT) specifically the aged drivers showed long BRT than the younger drivers due to distraction. Moreover, the older drivers had much more substantial decrease in stopping time (ST) before traffic line than the younger drivers.

6) Drivers show signs of longer headways at the beginning of the lead-vehicle brake event, relative to the baseline condition which may indicate that drivers diverted their attention away from speed monitoring while engaged in phone conversation, but compensated for the increased task demands by increasing their headways

In Summary, Due to the attention lapses, the driver’s mental/cognitive workload increased which may result in life threatening death. So we should omit the habit of talking in cell phone while driving.