Bioptic Telescope Use in Naturalistic Driving by People with Visual Impairment

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate the telescope use behaviors in natural daily driving of people with reduced visual acuity licensed to drive with a bioptic (a small spectacle-mounted telescope). METHODS: A large dataset (477 hours) of naturalistic driving was collected from 19 bioptic drivers (visual acuity 20/60 to 20/160 without the telescope). To reduce the data volume, a multiloss 50-layer deep residual neural network (ResNet-50) was used to detect potential bioptic telescope use events. Then, a total of 120 hours of selected video clips were reviewed and annotated in detail. RESULTS: The frequency of looking through their telescopes ranged from 4 to 308 times per hour (median: 27, interquartile range [IQR], 19–75), with each bioptic use lasting median 1.4 seconds (IQR, 1.2–1.8). Thus, participants spent only 1.6% (IQR, 0.7%–3.5%) driving time with their telescopes aiding their vision. Bioptic telescopes were used most often for checking the road ahead (84.8%), followed by looking at traffic lights (5.3%), and reading road signs (4.6%). CONCLUSIONS: In daily driving, the bioptic drivers mostly (>98% of driving time) drove under low visual acuity conditions. The bioptic telescope was mainly used for observing road and traffic conditions in the distance for situational awareness. Only a small portion of usage was for road sign reading. TRANSLATIONAL RELEVANCE: This study provides new insights into how the vision rehabilitation device—bioptic telescopes are used in daily driving. The findings may be helpful for designing bioptic driving training programs.