What is Physiological Indices

Several actions and/or operations might interfere with those required during car-driving and thus elicit dual task conditions. Those related to driving itself involve manipulating commands or instruments and should be automated during the learning to drive period to ensure safety. Others, independent of driving may be delayed (eating, smoking a cigarette). Finally, others like manipulating a navigation system or holding a cellphone have potential interference more or less related to driving. The authors now step back about 25 years to analyze the interference between driving and phoning and assess the risk associated with it. Epidemiology provides an overview of mobile phone use and hypotheses about accident causes. If hand-held phones obviously interfere with driving actions, the authors should explain why hands-free kits do not solve all safety concerns. Then, analyzing the operations affected by phoning and describing the objective measures revealing impaired driving performance will address this issue. The authors finally highlight the conditions for relatively safe phone use as well as those that should be banned. Deciding to phone or not will thus depend on driving safety education, during which skills of caution should have been learned.