Pedestrian injuries are a leading cause of paediatric injury. Effective, practical and cost-efficient behavioural interventions to teach young children street crossing skills are needed. They must be empirically supported and theoretically based. Virtual reality (VR) offers promise to fill this need and teach child pedestrian safety skills for several reasons, including: (A) repeated unsupervised practice without risk of injury, (B) automated feedback on crossing success or failure, (C) tailoring to child skill levels: (D) appealing and fun training environment, and (E) most recently given technological advances, potential for broad dissemination using mobile smartphone technology.
Extending previous work, we will evaluate delivery of an immersive pedestrian VR using mobile smartphones and the Google Cardboard platform, technology enabling standard smartphones to function as immersive VR delivery systems. We will overcome limitations of previous research suggesting children learnt some pedestrian skills after six VR training sessions but did not master adult-level pedestrian skills by implementing a randomised non-inferiority trial with two equal-sized groups of children ages 7-8 years (total N=498). All children will complete baseline, postintervention and 6-month follow-up assessments of pedestrian safety and up to 25 30-min pedestrian safety training trials until they reach adult levels of functioning. Half the children will be randomly assigned to train in Google Cardboard and the other half in a semi-immersive kiosk VR. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) models will assess primary outcomes.
If results are as hypothesised, mobile smartphones offer substantial potential to overcome barriers of dissemination and implementation and deliver pedestrian safety training to children worldwide.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 01 January 2018.
All research outputs
#9,911,616
of 33,779,198 outputs
Outputs from Injury Prevention
#1,398
of 2,479 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#103,871
of 336,357 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Injury Prevention
#20
of 73 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 33,779,198 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 70th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,479 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 24.0. This one is in the 44th percentile – i.e., 44% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 73 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 72% of its contemporaries.
