Quantifying Naturalistic Driving and Navigation Behaviours: Insights into Early Signs of Alzheimer’s Disease
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Abstract
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has been associated with changes in driving behaviours and navigational deficits, often emerging in early stages. The ATN framework defines AD pathology through beta-amyloid (A), tau (T), and neurodegeneration (N) biomarkers, which can manifest before clinical symptoms. In this study, we designed and calculated several metrics to quantify navigation and driving behaviours to understand how they relate to ATN biomarkers in individuals without cognitive impairment. Cerebral spinal fluid biomarker (CSF) concentrations and GPS driving data were collected from 125 cognitively normal participants between ages 65 and 85 enrolled in a longitudinal study at Washington University School of Medicine. Participants were categorized as biomarker-negative (-) or biomarker-positive (+) according to CSF concentrations of A, T, and N biomarkers. Several metrics were designed to capture temporal, spatial, and navigational aspects of driving. Temporal metrics included idle time at the start and end of trips to examine driver hesitation. Spatial metrics included distance travelled and life space (distance from home). Navigational metrics included turn counts, route straightness and route complexity, route diversity (proportion of unique routes), most common route concentration (frequency of most travelled route), and comparisons of actual versus time-optimized routes to evaluate navigational decision-making. Exploratory cross-sectional analyses over one and longitudinal analyses assessed trends over two years revealed notable relationships between the metrics and ATN biomarkers. N+ participants may have lower idle time at the start of a trip and lower route diversity than N- participants. Route diversity may also be reduced for T+ participants compared to T- participants. Complexity was higher for A+ participants after accounting for age, though it decreased with age. Idle time at the start of a trip increased with time for T- and N- participants but not T+ or N+ participants. Additionally, both straightness and the ratio of the actual route straightness to the optimized route straightness increased over time for N+ participants but not N- participants. These findings highlight the utility of the metrics in capturing subtle changes in driving and navigation behaviours and emphasize their potential as early markers of AD-related changes.