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. 2020 Mar 9;9(4):11.
doi: 10.1167/tvst.9.4.11. eCollection 2020 Mar.

Bioptic Telescope Use in Naturalistic Driving by People with Visual Impairment

Shuhang Wang  1 , Mojtaba Moharrer  1 , Vilte Baliutaviciute  1 , Bradley E Dougherty  2 , Walter Cybis  3 , Alex R Bowers  1 , Gang Luo  1
Affiliations

Bioptic Telescope Use in Naturalistic Driving by People with Visual Impairment

Shuhang Wang et al. Transl Vis Sci Technol. .

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the telescope use behaviors in natural daily driving of people with reduced visual acuity licensed to drive with a bioptic (a small spectacle-mounted telescope).

Methods: A large dataset (477 hours) of naturalistic driving was collected from 19 bioptic drivers (visual acuity 20/60 to 20/160 without the telescope). To reduce the data volume, a multiloss 50-layer deep residual neural network (ResNet-50) was used to detect potential bioptic telescope use events. Then, a total of 120 hours of selected video clips were reviewed and annotated in detail.

Results: The frequency of looking through their telescopes ranged from 4 to 308 times per hour (median: 27, interquartile range [IQR], 19-75), with each bioptic use lasting median 1.4 seconds (IQR, 1.2-1.8). Thus, participants spent only 1.6% (IQR, 0.7%-3.5%) driving time with their telescopes aiding their vision. Bioptic telescopes were used most often for checking the road ahead (84.8%), followed by looking at traffic lights (5.3%), and reading road signs (4.6%).

Conclusions: In daily driving, the bioptic drivers mostly (>98% of driving time) drove under low visual acuity conditions. The bioptic telescope was mainly used for observing road and traffic conditions in the distance for situational awareness. Only a small portion of usage was for road sign reading.

Translational relevance: This study provides new insights into how the vision rehabilitation device-bioptic telescopes are used in daily driving. The findings may be helpful for designing bioptic driving training programs.

Keywords: bioptic telescope; driver behavior; naturalistic driving; vision.

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Conflict of interest statement

Disclosure: S. Wang, None; M. Moharrer, None; V. Baliutaviciute, None; B.E. Dougherty, None; W. Cybis, None; A.R. Bowers, None; G. Luo, None

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Illustration of bioptic telescope use. (a) Looking through the carrier lens (below the telescope) with unmagnified, low visual acuity vision. (b) Looking through the telescope with magnified vision.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Digital Video Recording (DVR) system built as a rear view mirror. It is comprised of a front-scene view camera, a small in-car view camera on the far right side of the mirror, and a GPS recording device. The camera system did not impede participants’ view through either the windshield or mirrors.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Aiming point depicted based on the head pose. (a) Front-scene view channel with aiming point highlighted by red box (telescope is being used to view a car ahead on the road). (b) In-car view channel where the driver is dipping head to look through the bioptic telescope. The RBG axes representing the head pose are plotted according to the ResNet-50 results.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
(a) Percentage of driving occurrence in each hour before and after sunset. (b) Percentage of total driving time spent driving at night. The blue vertical line marks the sunset time, which separates the day (on the left) and the night (on the right). The line within each box represents the median; box length represents the interquartile range (IQR); whiskers represent data within 1.5 × IQR. “ × ” indicates outliers (between 1.5× and 3× IQR) and “+” indicates extreme outliers (>3× IQR). Outliers discussed in the text are identified by participant number (here, #13 and #5).
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
(a) Distribution of bioptic telescope use frequency (number of times used per hour). (b) Distribution of the driving time (percentage) spent in using bioptic telescope.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Histogram of biopic telescope use duration for participant #3, who often looked through his telescope for a long time.
Figure 7.
Figure 7.
Distribution of bioptic telescope use with respect to maneuvers after each bioptic use event.
Figure 8.
Figure 8.
Distribution of bioptic telescope use with respect to the types of targets viewed through the bioptic.
Figure 9.
Figure 9.
Distribution of bioptic telescope use with respect to intersection (yes) and road type (highway). Since intersection (yes or no) and road type (highway or non-highway) were binary-choice questions, the figure only presents data for one choice for each of them for simplicity.
Figure 10.
Figure 10.
Distribution of bioptic telescope use with respect to traffic conditions.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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