NCT05554614

Behind the Wheel (BTW) Smartphone Application

Behind the Wheel (BTW) Smartphone Application: Utilizing Technology to Quantify Driving Behaviors

• Status: Active Not Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 180 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Motao Zhu · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 15 Years – 17 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The purpose of this study is to find out if a phone app can help the learning-to-drive process among teenagers and novice drivers.

Detailed description

This project will assess the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of an app (BTW) to quantify driving behaviors and promote safe driving in adolescents who are beginning their learner period of licensure. 90 teens and their corresponding parents/guardians will be randomized into one of three study groups. Researchers aim to test the feasibility of the BTW app on acceptance and retention, evaluate the preliminary efficacy of the BTW app with a teen-parent dyad intervention on driving performance after using the BTW app for six months, and investigate the long-term effects of the BTW app intervention on driving performance and safety attitudes among teens.

Conditions

• High-risk Driving Events

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	BTW app with reward-based feedback	Teen drivers will be notified of their weekly driving performance via a driving safety score with information on the types of high-risk driving behaviors committed as well as progress on maintaining and/or improving weekly safe driving behaviors. Educational materials on different driving situations and scenarios associated with the high-risk driving behaviors (e.g. 90-second videos) will be provided for the driver to review at any point and time. Information on these driving behaviors and the education material will be provided via push notifications from the BTW app. Weekly leader boards will show the driver's driving safety score in comparison to other drivers of the same age. Consistently high driver safety scores in certain driving skill areas (e.g., cornering) and a total overall score above 70% of other users on that skill or total score will unlock gamification-based rewards (e.g., driving safety badges, driving safety score leader board, group challenges with winners).
BEHAVIORAL	BTW app with situational supervised driving practice	Teen drivers will be provided bi-weekly push-notifications from the BTW app notifying them of situational supervised driving practice activities that are to be completed during the assigned week. There are 12 situational supervised driving activities and six skill-building driving activities (Table 1). Skill-building sessions are assigned for off weeks during the first half of the six months (weeks 2-12), allowing for skills to be further developed when the situations are encountered for a second time (weeks 15-23). Parents will be prompted to directly log situational supervised and skill-building driving activities in the app after the session within the BTW app to obtain the module completion date and duration time.
BEHAVIORAL	Sham BTW app	Teens will be provided links to passive education materials and information on car maintenance every week. They will not be given feedback on their driving performances.

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-02-19
• Primary completion: 2025-10-01
• Completion: 2025-10-01
• First posted: 2022-09-26
• Last updated: 2025-06-19

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States