{"id":8069,"date":"2018-11-08T13:53:46","date_gmt":"2018-11-08T13:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/?p=8069"},"modified":"2018-11-08T13:53:46","modified_gmt":"2018-11-08T13:53:46","slug":"researchers-investigate-strategies-to-curb-cell-phone-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/researchers-investigate-strategies-to-curb-cell-phone-use\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers investigate strategies to curb cell phone use"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Federal Highway Administration (FHA)<\/a> has awarded $1.84 million to researchers to study best practices for preventing cell phone use while driving.<\/p>\n

M. Kit Delgado, MD, MS, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania<\/a> (Penn) and an associate fellow at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia<\/a> (CHOP), along with a team from Penn and CHOP, have received the grant from the FHA, an agency within the United States Department of Transportation.<\/p>\n

The researchers will investigate strategies \u2014 such as redesigning insurance discounts \u2014 for reducing cell phone use while driving. The objective of the grant is to translate findings from the field of behavioral economics to interventions that can be delivered through smartphones to \u201cnudge\u201d drivers to reduce distracted driving arising from cell phone use. Behavioral economics combines insights and findings from psychology and economics to explain, and try to correct, counter-productive or predictably irrational decision-making.<\/p>\n

\u201cTyping and swiping on your phone while driving is something that everyone knows is dangerous and usually illegal, yet people continue to do it. Because it has become a common, impulsive, and almost subconscious behavior, they may not even know how much they are doing it,\u201d said Delgado. \u201cBy bringing together a team with experience in behavioral economics and behavioral design, traffic safety, statistics, and epidemiology, we\u2019ll be able to determine whether these strategies successfully address these other problem areas and can help reduce the dangerous and potentially lethal behavior of using a cell phone while driving.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study, a collaboration between researchers in Penn\u2019s Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, the Penn Injury Science Center, the Wharton School, and CHOP\u2019s Center for Injury Research and Prevention, will build on previous innovative and successful work conducted at Penn for testing behavioral economic strategies to change difficult health behaviors such as quitting smoking, staying fit, and taking medications as prescribed.<\/p>\n

The collaborators will seek to discover strategies that can be deployed in usage-based insurance (UBI) programs. Unlike typical insurance policies where rates are based on traditional ratings variables such as a customer\u2019s demographics, UBI uses in-vehicle devices or smartphone apps to understand actual driving behavior. In-vehicle devices and smartphone UBI apps capture driving data such as hard braking, speed, accelerations, time of day, and miles driven. More advanced smartphone telematics technology automatically detects distracting phone use like calls and other types of hand-held or hands-free phone use. Insurers can factor these new distraction events into programs offering safe driving discounts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Federal Highway Administration (FHA) has awarded $1.84 million to researchers to study best practices for preventing cell phone use while driving. M. Kit Delgado, MD, MS, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and an associate fellow at the Center for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":8070,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edriving.com\/three60\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}