This paper describes how we used a naturalistic driving methodology (the Driving Real-world In-vehicle Evaluation System – DRIVES chip) to examine differences in driving behavior over one year in a small sample of cognitively normal older adults. This pilot group included 10 participants with preclinical Alzheimer disease (AD) and 10 participants without, based on their biomarker measurements through brain imaging and cerebrospinal fluid measurements. As expected, because our sample was very small for this pilot study, there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups. However, older adults with preclinical AD drove less often, were less likely to drive at night, and had fewer aggressive driving behaviors such as hard braking, speeding, and sudden acceleration. We calculated the sample size that will be necessary to look at this in more depth.
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