Norms and validity of the DriVR: a virtual reality driving assessment for persons with head injuries

This article presents the results of two studies of a new driving simulator called "DriVR." The first, normative study examined the performance of an uninjured driving population on the simulator. The driving ability of 148 participants in eight age categories was assessed using DriVR. The second, discriminative validity study examined DriVR's ability to discriminate between the performance of head-injured and uninjured adults. We administered the DriVR assessment to 17 head-injured adults. The performance of this group was compared to that of a subgroup of uninjured participants that matched the brain-injured participants in age, gender, and years of education. In general, DriVR's measures showed age-related changes in participant performance and were able to discriminate between head-injured and uninjured participants. These results suggested that age norms would be useful for analyzing the performance of head-injured clients who are being assessed with DriVR. It should be noted, however, that these studies did not examine DriVR's ability to predict performance in real, on-the-road tests.