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Driving simulators offer a safe alternative to on-road driving for the evaluation of driving performance. Standardized procedures for providing individualized feedback on driving performance are not readily available. The aim of this paper is to describe a methodology for developing standardized procedures that provide individualized feedback (“LiveMetrics”) from a simulated driving assessment used to measure driving performance. A preliminary evaluation is presented to test the performance of the LiveMetrics methodology. Three key performance indicators are used to evaluate the performance and utility of the method in the context of the preliminary evaluation. The results from the preliminary evaluation suggest abilities to customize reporting features for feedback and integrate these into existing driver training and education programs.

Driving simulators provide a safe, highly reproducible environment in which to assess driver behavior. Nevertheless, data reduction to standardized metrics can be time-consuming and cumbersome. Further, the validity of the results is challenged by inconsistent definitions of metrics, precluding comparison across studies and integration of data. No established tool has yet been made available and kept current for the systematic reduction of literature-derived safety metrics. The long term goal of this work is to develop DriveLab, a set of widely applicable routines for reducing simulator data to expert-approved metrics. Since Matlab™ is so widely used in the research community, it was chosen as a suitable environment. This paper aims to serve as a case study of data reduction techniques and programming choices that were made for simulator analysis of a specific research project, the Simulated Driving Assessment.