Assessing the effect of eating as a distraction factor while driving on drivers' performance

الملخص EN

The increase in the number of traffic accidents, deaths, and injuries is a majorconcern for traffic and safety professionals.

Distraction from the road is common, but increases safety concerns.

Drivers engage in many behaviors that are adistraction from the task of driving, and these sources may be inside or outside thevehicle.

The driver may not have a clear idea of the negative impact of suchactivities on achieving safe driving.

The paper focused on one type of distractionthat occurs inside the car, the factor of eating while driving in order to address thequestion of whether such activities cause anxiety.

The effect of eating whiledriving as an additional task (dual task) compared to driving baseline (single task)on each driver's performance and safety was studied.

This research was conductedat the University of Technology-Iraq uses a fixed and medium accuracy drivingsimulator.

To measure driver performance, the driver's ability to maintain a setspeed limit was tested.

For safety, the driver's ability to avoid accidents wasmeasured.

The highway environment scenario was adopted to perform drivingexperiences for the 42 participants, the length of the road was 15 km, and thedriving experience took (30) minutes at a rate of (10-15) minutes for each drivingtask.

The results revealed a decrease in the mean journey speed of all participantsduring the (dual driving) experiment compared to the results of the mean journeyspeed (single driving).

The speed of females decreased more than males.

Theyoungest age group (19-29) years led at a faster rate than the age groups (30-39), (40-49), and (50-55).

No accidents were recorded during the baseline driving task.

In the dual driving task, females recorded a higher number of accidents than males.

The youth category (19-29) was characterized by recording the largest number ofaccidents.