Teen drivers with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are the focus of a new digital health project designed to reduce risky behavior behind the wheel. Jeffrey Keller, the Hibernia National Bank/Edward G. Schleider Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center, and Sara Seifert, president of Minnesota HealthSolutions, have received a $353,306 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the National Institute of Mental Health. Their goal is to develop a smartphone-based platform that helps teenagers with ADHD build safer driving habits while giving parents and healthcare professionals better tools to understand and support the transition to independent driving.
The project addresses a significant public health problem. Motor vehicle crashes remain the leading cause of death among teenagers in the United States, and adolescents with ADHD are considered one of the highest-risk groups for collisions. The disorder can affect sustained attention, working memory, impulse control, decision-making and the ability to manage several streams of information at once. These challenges can become especially consequential in a moving vehicle, where drivers must continuously monitor traffic, interpret changing conditions, regulate speed and respond rapidly to unexpected events.
Research has linked ADHD in young drivers to a greater likelihood of distracted driving, speeding, abrupt braking and other behaviors associated with crashes. Driving is not a single cognitive task but a continuously shifting system of perception, judgment and motor response. A driver must detect hazards, prioritize information, anticipate the actions of other road users and coordinate physical movements within fractions of a second. For teens whose attention or inhibition is impaired, the demands of this system may overwhelm developing driving skills, particularly during the early months of licensure.
The platform being developed by Keller and Seifert will use smartphone-based telematics to collect information about driving behavior. Telematics systems can infer events such as hard braking, rapid acceleration, speeding or abrupt changes in movement through sensors already built into modern smartphones. The technology is intended to transform these measurements into individualized feedback rather than simply producing a score. Teens and parents will be able to establish shared goals, review progress over time and receive coaching designed to encourage safer, more consistent behavior.
A central feature of the system will be its emphasis on collaboration between parents and teenagers. The transition to driving often represents a major step toward independence, and constant parental monitoring can create conflict if it is perceived as surveillance or punishment. By allowing families to set goals together and examine driving patterns using concrete data, the researchers hope to make safety discussions more constructive. Personalized coaching could help identify recurring problems, such as frequent phone distraction or aggressive braking, and convert them into specific behavioral targets that can be revisited over time.
The platform may also generate information useful to clinicians treating adolescents with ADHD. Physicians typically evaluate symptoms through conversations, questionnaires and reports from families, schools or workplaces, but driving behavior can be difficult to assess directly. An anonymized or family-authorized record of real-world driving challenges could provide additional context about how attention, impulsivity or medication-related concerns affect daily functioning. The system is not intended to replace clinical judgment, but it could help healthcare providers ask more precise questions and make better-informed decisions about treatment and safety planning.
The new award builds on an earlier NIH SBIR project led by Keller and collaborators between 2022 and 2025. That initiative developed the StreetCoach Safer Driver Program for older adults and analyzed more than 11,000 real-world drives. The work demonstrated the feasibility of using digital technologies to detect risky driving patterns and deliver personalized interventions outside a laboratory or driving simulator. Multiple peer-reviewed publications emerged from that research, providing the technical and practical foundation for adapting StreetCoach to a younger population with different developmental and clinical needs.
The researchers will work with parents and teenagers during Phase I to develop a prototype and evaluate whether intended users find it understandable, acceptable and useful. This stage is expected to focus on usability and early feasibility rather than proving that the platform reduces crashes. Participants’ responses will help determine how driving information should be presented, how frequently feedback should be delivered and which parent-engagement strategies are most likely to encourage cooperation. If the initial work is successful, the team plans to pursue larger clinical studies and additional commercialization opportunities, with the Phase I project expected to conclude in spring 2027.
The potential impact extends beyond individual families. Louisiana has the highest motor vehicle insurance costs in the United States, while traffic crashes generate an estimated $10.5 billion in economic costs in the state each year. Technologies that reduce dangerous driving and improve management of health conditions that influence driving could therefore affect medical expenses, insurance losses, injuries and quality of life. The researchers describe the project as an effort to translate behavioral science and mobile sensing into a commercially available tool that can support safer independence for teenagers with ADHD. The award also illustrates how federal small-business research funding can connect academic expertise with industry development, moving a promising intervention from research settings toward everyday use.
Subject of Research:
A smartphone-based digital health and telematics platform designed to improve driving safety among teenagers with ADHD through personalized coaching, shared parent-teen goals and behavioral monitoring.
Article Title:
Smartphone Platform Targets Safer Driving for Teenagers with ADHD
Web References:
https://www.pbrc.edu/news/media/2026/www.pbrc.edu
Keywords:
ADHD, teen drivers, driving safety, digital health, smartphone telematics, motor vehicle crashes, personalized coaching, parent engagement, NIH SBIR, Pennington Biomedical, StreetCoach, adolescent health, behavioral intervention
