Temporary Disability: Development of an Evaluation Framework

The purpose of this work was to assess the impact of temporary disability on the ease and effectiveness of automobile driving tasks. The main objective of this work was to generate a framework to evaluate the extent to which a given temporary disability, caused by a given primary condition and associated with different symptoms, affects individual driving tasks at any given timepoint following the onset of the temporary disability. Injuries and medical conditions can limit driving ability—from chronic conditions to temporary conditions. Ultimately, the disability produced by these conditions may result in driving restrictions, reliance on compensatory driving techniques, or both. This can be particularly onerous for individuals that live in areas not well served by public transportation. In an ideal analysis of temporary disability, translating temporary disability into its disruptive impacts on components of the driving task (i.e., functional driving domains) should identify affected driving tasks, the degree of impact on driving tasks, and necessary/useful compensatory driving techniques and vehicle modifications, as well as inform return-to-drive guidelines that are not overly conservative. In reality, however, connections between temporary disability symptoms and their effects of specific driving tasks are either incomplete or completely nonexistent. Given this background, the current effort aimed to propose a preliminary framework and model for the systematic evaluation of effects of temporary disability on functional driving domains through a semi-hierarchical task analysis and identification of different elements of the temporary disability’s manifestation that should be considered in such a framework. A cascading model was developed that first associates a temporary disability event with specific temporary disabilities and then qualifies those disabilities into a set of affected capabilities. Finally, the affected capabilities are translated into impacts on specific driving tasks. The output from the model allows the user to understand the hindrance that a temporary disability event may create on someone’s driving so that reasonable return-to-drive guidelines may be generated and/or patients can self-regulate their driving to accommodate for temporarily diminished skills.