The Federal Highway Administration recently awarded a $1.84 million grant to Penn Medicine to fund a three-company partnership to investigate strategies to reduce distracted driving.
Penn Medicine will participate in the study along with Progressive Insurance and TrueMotion, the company that runs the Progressive Snapshot mobile telematics program.
Progressive Snapshot customers will be invited via a smartphone app. Based on the results, participants will be offered interventions such as financial incentives for not using the phone while driving and silencing notifications while driving.
“Distracted driving is a national epidemic that’s vastly underreported,” Kit Delgado, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania and lead researcher on the project, said. “Activities that cause distracted driving – such as handheld cellphone use – are illegal in many states, yet it still happens every day. The research study with TrueMotion and Progressive is designed to understand how we can reduce distracted driving across various demographic segments. We’ve assembled a team with expertise in behavioral economics and behavioral design, traffic safety, statistics, and epidemiology to assess the effectiveness of distracted driving interventions.”
It is estimated 8.6 million drivers in the United States drive distracted 50 percent of the time. According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, distracted driving kills 3,450 people annually.