Driving simulators for an efficient and safe traffic work environment for police officers

About the project

Even though traffic is the most dangerous environment for police officers to work in, the research that is conducted on the road safety of emergency drivers, and especially the work environment of police officers, is limited. The same applies to the development of driver training for police officers. The most common cause of death for police officers in the line of duty is traffic accidents (Lindroth, 2022) and in 2020 the cost of damage to police vehicles amounted to 100 million, 6000 vehicles were damaged that year (Kammarkollegiet, 2021). Accidents occur both during emergency driving, where the police car is often driven at high speed, and during the ordinary performance of duty at normal speed (Lundälv, 2009). Therefore, driving is an important part of basic training for police officers and safe driving is a skill that must continue to be developed during professional life.

Against this background, the goal of the project is to establish a research and development environment with a focus on simulator driving for blue light operations and which contributes to a more efficient and safe training environment and future work environment for police officers and other blue light personnel. The basis of the project is simulators with a higher degree of fidelity than those used in police training today, which also enables a comparison of different types of simulators. An important part is the collaboration between researchers and police officers to jointly identify new needs for research and development with the aim of improving traffic safety for police officers through knowledge-based simulator pedagogy.

The following areas are in focus:

1. Develop instructor training based on user and teacher experience with simulator-based learning and teaching.
2. Develop a simulator-based training course that is perceived as realistic by the participants and which can become a complement to the resource-intensive training that can only be offered to a limited extent today.
3. Follow up the participants who undergo the training and interview them partly about the experiences of the training, partly to follow them for a period of time and then follow up how well prepared they felt after an actual implementation of the training.
4. Comparisons between simulators with different degrees of fidelity in the ability to reach the same goal.
5. Comparison of occurrence and degree of simulator sickness in simulators with different levels of fidelity, with and without VR sets.