Dunlap Research worked with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) to lead a study on Telematics and Distracted Driving for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). 

“The government is very concerned with the number of fatal crashes that have a distraction element involved,” Mikey Pritchard, Systems Analyst II for Dunlap, said.  “There are a number of cases where someone is looking at their cell phone and they hit someone, or someone hits them. For example, a study in 2023 showed that 8% of fatal crashes in 2021 were distraction affected, and of those, 12%, were related to cell phone use or cell phone use was a contributing factor. 

“This project is looking at technologies that are currently available that can help us identify how often people are engaging in dangerous driving when they are distracted. In order to do so, we have technologies that are based on cell phones, telematics applications, that can determine how fast a vehicle is going, how distracted a driver is, and whether they are using their phone or not. We also have more traditional data acquisition systems (DASs) featuring multiple camera feeds that are looking at the driver and inputs coming from the car itself through the OBD-II port, looking at things like acceleration and speed.” 

What is your role in the project, and what do you enjoy about it? 

“I like interacting with new technologies,” Pritchard said. “A lot of the nuggets of goodness are hidden in the raw data itself. One thing that I'm really enjoying, and what I hope I can bring to the project, is the ability to programmatically get at those more hidden things and let the Project Investigators know about them.” 

What are we trying to accomplish with this study? 

“One thing this project is doing is giving us the opportunity to explore the other sort of DASs that are available to see if there's one that would be more effective for future studies,” Pritchard said.  Specifically, we are looking at phone-based apps. Two big things are: 1) having a nice comparison of the traditional more expensive complex DASs that are available on the market, which we can use both as a barometer and a means to decide on the systems and instruments to be used for future studies, and 2) we can see if the cheaper phone-based systems are comparable.”