Pedal Misapplication: Interruption Effects and Age-Related Differences

Effects of repetition of a car-driving pedal maneuver and neural output in older adults

Understanding the ability of older adults to control pedal position angle and investigating whether this ability can be enhanced through practice may contribute to the prevention of traffic accidents. This study aimed to investigate repetitive effects on variability of the pedal position and neural drive during car-pedal operation in older adults. Thirteen older and 11 young adults performed 105 (21 sets × 5 repetitions) pedal angle control tasks with plantar flexor contraction. High-density surface electromyograms were recorded of triceps surae muscles. A cumulative spike train as a neural drive was calculated using continuously active motor unit activities. The coefficient of variation of the angle was higher in older (1.47 ± 1.06 %) than young (0.41 ± 0.21 %) adults in the first sets, and improved to 0.67 ± 0.51 % in the final sets in older adults only. There was no significant difference in neural drive variability between older and young adults. Our results suggest that repetition improves angular steadiness in older adults. However, this effect could not be explained by neural output which is estimated from lower threshold motor units that are continuously active.

Electric Bus Pedal Misapplication Detection Based on Phase Space Reconstruction Method

Due to the environmental protection of electric buses, they are gradually replacing traditional fuel buses. Several previous studies have found that accidents related to electric vehicles are linked to Unintended Acceleration (UA), which is mostly caused by the driver pressing the wrong pedal. Therefore, this study proposed a Model for Detecting Pedal Misapplication in Electric Buses (MDPMEB). In this work, natural driving experiments for urban electric buses and pedal misapplication simulation experiments were carried out in a closed field; furthermore, a phase space reconstruction method was introduced, based on chaos theory, to map sequence data to a high-dimensional space in order to produce normal braking and pedal misapplication image datasets. Based on these findings, a modified Swin Transformer network was built. To prevent the model from overfitting when considering small sample data and to improve the generalization ability of the model, it was pre-trained using a publicly available dataset; moreover, the weights of the prior knowledge model were loaded into the model for training. The proposed model was also compared to machine learning and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) algorithms. This study showed that this model was able to detect normal braking and pedal misapplication behavior accurately and quickly, and the accuracy rate on the test dataset is 97.58%, which is 9.17% and 4.5% higher than the machine learning algorithm and CNN algorithm, respectively.

Influence of pedal characteristics on pedaling control and neural drive in older adults

This study was aimed to investigate whether pedal characteristics and age affect pedal position accuracy, fluctuation, and neural drive variability during a position control task. Twelve older (age: 72.8 ± 3.6 years) and twelve young (age: 23.8 ± 4.4 years) adults performed trapezoidal position control tasks involving holding plantar flexor contraction for 10 s with four pedal conditions (regular and pulley types × standard and low forces). Neural drive of the triceps surae muscle was estimated with high-density surface electromyograms and individual motor unit decomposition methods. The central 5 s of the sustained contraction phase was used for analysis. Variabilities of the angle and neural drive are presented by the coefficient of variation. We observed that the angle fluctuation was greater in older than young adults for four pedal conditions (p < 0.05). Regardless of age, using pulley pedals increased angle fluctuation more than regular pedals (p < 0.05). No significant interaction was found for pedal conditions and age in pedal position accuracy, angle fluctuation, or neural output. Our results suggest that older adults have poor control ability to maintain pedal angles, and pulley pedals make it difficult to adjust the pedal angles regardless of age. However, the neural output estimated by the continuously active motor units failed to explain these differences.