Evaluation of the driving ability in disabled persons: a practitioners' view

Purpose and methods. The purpose of this paper is to present, on the basis of four genuine cases from the Rehabilitation Research Unit of Oulu University, the theoretical frame in which evaluations of driving ability of disabled persons can be made.

Results. First, it is not the operations with the control devices but the correct mental actions which the driver carries out with the help of the control devices which are crucial for safe driving. Second, driving ability is only partly a biomedical object of research and one ought to avoid an excessive medicalisation of an evaluation of driving ability. Third, the driver meets traffic situations not by his or her separate biological or psychological functions, such as vision, attention, memory, thinking, motives, but as an integrated whole, as a personality.

Conclusions. By its complexity an evaluation of driving ability can be compared to an evaluation of working capacity where often a multidisciplinary team is needed. When evaluating driving ability we have to take a step from low-level motor operations towards high-level mental actions, from the measurement of acuity of eyesight towards the testing of the flexibility of perception, from the diagnosis-based evaluation to the patient-based evaluation, from using the common pencil - paper tests towards the traffic-related task-specific tests and from the testing of separate single general non-driving-related factors towards an evaluation of the theoretically based driving performance as whole.