In partnership with the Georgia Governor’s Office of Highway Safety, Shepherd Center has created AutoCoach, an app that teaches parents how to effectively and safely teach their teen to drive. AutoCoach aims to improve parental supervisory behaviors and involvement through quizzes, distraction notifications, driving logs and a ten-chapter curriculum based on best practices.
In today’s podcast, Shepherd Center director of injury prevention Emma Harrington discusses how the app aims to combat motor vehicle crashes and promote injury prevention. The app will be available as a free download in the Apple and Google Play app stores in summer 2017.
Selected Podcast
Promoting Teen Driver Safety with AutoCoach App
Featured Speaker:
Emma Harrington, Ed.M
Emma Harrington, MSPS, is the director of injury prevention and education services at Shepherd Center. Previously, Emma started the injury prevention program at Grady Memorial Hospital’s Trauma Department in Atlanta. She holds a master of education degree in international education policy from Harvard University. Originally from Boston, Emma is a licensed social studies teacher. Transcription:
Promoting Teen Driver Safety with AutoCoach App
Melanie Cole (Host): In partnership with the Georgia Governor's Office of Highway Safety, Shepard Center has created Autocoach, an app that teaches parents how to effectively and safely teach their teen to drive. Autocoach aims to improve parental supervisory behaviors and involvement through quizzes, distraction notifications, driving logs and a ten-chapter curriculum based on best practices. My guest today on today's podcast is Shepard Center Director of Injury Protection, Emma Harrington. Welcome to the show, Emma. So, let's talk about how this app aims to combat motor vehicle crashes and promotes injury prevention. Tell us about the Autocoach app and how it came to be.
Emma Harrington, Ed.M (Guest): Well, thank you so much for having me. Autocoach is such an exciting project, and it has been in the works for over two years now. So, our top mechanism of injury for brain and spinal cord catastrophic injury is motor vehicle crashes. So, we thought we have to do something about this. So we happen to have four certified driver rehabilitation specialists on site here at Shepard Center, and in the state of Georgia, there's only eleven, and these certified specialists help our patients learn how to drive again, and so we thought these guys have so much knowledge. We have to utilize this somehow to get this out into the general public, and we figured that in all of our states, not just in Georgia, that parents do not have a lot of experience in teaching teens how to drive. Nothing gives you that experience until you actually have to do it. So, they don't know where to start. So we used our specialists to create a ten-chapter curriculum to walk a parent through the step by step -- so how do you get into a car? How do you make sure it's safe? Is the tire pressure correct? All the way through targeting those top kind of teen scary moments -- the overcorrecting, the driving too fast, the driving at night -- to kind of target the distracted driving and the risk-taking behaviors we see that get kids to end up at Shepard Center.
So, the curriculum is kind of aimed at really taking risk-taking behaviors from both parents and teens while teaching them both how to drive properly.
Melanie: What an amazing bit of technology you guys. What a great idea. So now, some of the things that parents worry about, you mentioned distracted driving and overcorrecting, what about things like highway driving? Is there something -- I mean how do you teach your kid to drive on a highway?
Emma: Right, so it's practice, practice, practice. So studies have shown that parents who model and monitor their teens correctly have safer kids in the car. So, there's things called graduated drivers licensing laws in almost every single state, and these are kind of laws to keep teens safe. They target night-time driving. They target how many kids you can have in the car with you, and they kind of are aimed to protect our teenagers, but the main protection is practicing with them, and spending those 40 hours or those 50 hours, which is a lot of time with your child in the car. So, obviously, you don't start out with highway driving. You start out with the very basics and as soon as you have gone through specific skillsets where you feel confident that your teen can look over their left-hand shoulder while maintaining their lane, then we move to the later chapters where highway driving and things like driving around big trucks come into play because that's where we see an awful lot of crashes around big trucks, highway merging -- on the highway, off the highway -- so, it's really the miles driven that make your teen safer. The time spent behind the wheel with you, and the miles driven and with a parent or guardian that’s actually paying attention.
Melanie: So, tell us about the Autocoach app. When will it be available? How can people get it? Will it cost money? You know, give us some of the specifics.
Emma: Sure. So, it's a free download in the Apple app store and the Google Play Store so if you have an Apple or an Android. This is going to be available to you, and it's totally free of charge. We have also gone big, and we have done it nationwide. So, it's available for all of the 50 states and Washington, DC. So, what that means is the graduated driver's licensing laws are different in each state, so our app has a dropdown menu where you can designate what state you're in, and the specific requirements will pop up for you, and we go live July 13th.
Melanie: Wow. I mean, what a great service that Shepard Center is providing for all of the states, really, because this is something that parents go through and so what do you tell parents when they, I mean, obviously, you guys are working with stroke, you know, patients and brain injuries, spinal cord injury, and they have to learn to drive again. But when a parent comes to you and says, oh my teen or something -- what do you tell them you would like them to know about their role in all of this?
Emma: I would like them to know that the behaviors we display from a very early age, our children are picking them up. When we're dropping them off at nursery school; when we're picking their friends up at soccer practice. Our children are looking at us and figuring out how we drive. So if we drive with the hot coffee in one hand, or if we drive on Bluetooth or if we're distracted in any way -- they're picking up that that behavior is okay. So, this app aims to not just get the message across to teenagers that while you're on the road, driving is intense enough. There's so many reflexes you need to anticipate. You need to scan -- that you need to pay attention to, but there's not time for distractions, but as they're picking up from their parents at a young age that it's doable; it's possible, and it's common practice -- that is not setting a precedent that we want any teenagers to follow. And that, unfortunately is why a lot of the teenagers that come to Shepard end up here is because it's this cultural practice that distracted driving is okay -- that risk-taking is okay. So, that's what we really want parents to know that if you want your teenager to drive safely, please model that behavior from the get-go.
Melanie: That's great advice, and tell us about the accountability -- the parent and teen agreement --because we've heard that really you should make a contract with your child about texting and having too many friends in the car and that sort of thing. Tell us about the accountability factor.
Emma: So, the accountability factor goes both ways. So, we want the teenager to understand that driving is a privilege, and there's a lot of money that goes behind it, right? The insurance money, the cost of the car, the cost of petrol. But we also want the parent to understand that it is their responsibility to keep their teenagers safe throughout this process as well, and there's skills and ways that they can do that through compliance with the graduated driver's licensing laws, but also through increased supervision. So, the agreement that the parent and the teenager sign is customizable. So, they can fill in different sorts of things like -- IF we catch you texting, no more driving, or you are responsible for 50% of the gas cost for this month -- and setting standards that work for your family, and it's something that can be printed out and put on a magnet on your fridge, to guide, to process, and it keeps both parties accountable.
Melanie: That's wonderful news and as a parent, I applaud and appreciate this app. So, wrap it up for us, Emma, and give us your best advice about the Autocoach app, when it's going to be available, and what you would really like the listeners to know about the importance of teen driver safety.
Emma: So, this app is really the first app that gives you a concrete curriculum while tracking of the hours of supervised driving. So, it's going to make the process -- we hope -- as seamless as possible. We know this is a stressful time for parents and teens, but it's also a really, really important time to stress safety to your teenager before they go out into the world on their own and develop their own driving habits. So, at Shepard, we see an awful lot of tragic incidents happen that are completely preventable from distracted driving, texting and driving, from just taking your eyes off the road for one second. That's all it takes. So, I would just encourage everybody to focus on driving when they're driving. That’s really the most important thing, and especially when you're carrying your young kids around or teaching your teenagers how to drive. They are your most important asset, and we have to protect them as much as we can.
Melanie: Thank you so much Emma for such great information. You're listening to Shepard Center Radio and for more information on the Autocoach app, you can go to shepard.org. That's shepard.org. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening.
Promoting Teen Driver Safety with AutoCoach App
Melanie Cole (Host): In partnership with the Georgia Governor's Office of Highway Safety, Shepard Center has created Autocoach, an app that teaches parents how to effectively and safely teach their teen to drive. Autocoach aims to improve parental supervisory behaviors and involvement through quizzes, distraction notifications, driving logs and a ten-chapter curriculum based on best practices. My guest today on today's podcast is Shepard Center Director of Injury Protection, Emma Harrington. Welcome to the show, Emma. So, let's talk about how this app aims to combat motor vehicle crashes and promotes injury prevention. Tell us about the Autocoach app and how it came to be.
Emma Harrington, Ed.M (Guest): Well, thank you so much for having me. Autocoach is such an exciting project, and it has been in the works for over two years now. So, our top mechanism of injury for brain and spinal cord catastrophic injury is motor vehicle crashes. So, we thought we have to do something about this. So we happen to have four certified driver rehabilitation specialists on site here at Shepard Center, and in the state of Georgia, there's only eleven, and these certified specialists help our patients learn how to drive again, and so we thought these guys have so much knowledge. We have to utilize this somehow to get this out into the general public, and we figured that in all of our states, not just in Georgia, that parents do not have a lot of experience in teaching teens how to drive. Nothing gives you that experience until you actually have to do it. So, they don't know where to start. So we used our specialists to create a ten-chapter curriculum to walk a parent through the step by step -- so how do you get into a car? How do you make sure it's safe? Is the tire pressure correct? All the way through targeting those top kind of teen scary moments -- the overcorrecting, the driving too fast, the driving at night -- to kind of target the distracted driving and the risk-taking behaviors we see that get kids to end up at Shepard Center.
So, the curriculum is kind of aimed at really taking risk-taking behaviors from both parents and teens while teaching them both how to drive properly.
Melanie: What an amazing bit of technology you guys. What a great idea. So now, some of the things that parents worry about, you mentioned distracted driving and overcorrecting, what about things like highway driving? Is there something -- I mean how do you teach your kid to drive on a highway?
Emma: Right, so it's practice, practice, practice. So studies have shown that parents who model and monitor their teens correctly have safer kids in the car. So, there's things called graduated drivers licensing laws in almost every single state, and these are kind of laws to keep teens safe. They target night-time driving. They target how many kids you can have in the car with you, and they kind of are aimed to protect our teenagers, but the main protection is practicing with them, and spending those 40 hours or those 50 hours, which is a lot of time with your child in the car. So, obviously, you don't start out with highway driving. You start out with the very basics and as soon as you have gone through specific skillsets where you feel confident that your teen can look over their left-hand shoulder while maintaining their lane, then we move to the later chapters where highway driving and things like driving around big trucks come into play because that's where we see an awful lot of crashes around big trucks, highway merging -- on the highway, off the highway -- so, it's really the miles driven that make your teen safer. The time spent behind the wheel with you, and the miles driven and with a parent or guardian that’s actually paying attention.
Melanie: So, tell us about the Autocoach app. When will it be available? How can people get it? Will it cost money? You know, give us some of the specifics.
Emma: Sure. So, it's a free download in the Apple app store and the Google Play Store so if you have an Apple or an Android. This is going to be available to you, and it's totally free of charge. We have also gone big, and we have done it nationwide. So, it's available for all of the 50 states and Washington, DC. So, what that means is the graduated driver's licensing laws are different in each state, so our app has a dropdown menu where you can designate what state you're in, and the specific requirements will pop up for you, and we go live July 13th.
Melanie: Wow. I mean, what a great service that Shepard Center is providing for all of the states, really, because this is something that parents go through and so what do you tell parents when they, I mean, obviously, you guys are working with stroke, you know, patients and brain injuries, spinal cord injury, and they have to learn to drive again. But when a parent comes to you and says, oh my teen or something -- what do you tell them you would like them to know about their role in all of this?
Emma: I would like them to know that the behaviors we display from a very early age, our children are picking them up. When we're dropping them off at nursery school; when we're picking their friends up at soccer practice. Our children are looking at us and figuring out how we drive. So if we drive with the hot coffee in one hand, or if we drive on Bluetooth or if we're distracted in any way -- they're picking up that that behavior is okay. So, this app aims to not just get the message across to teenagers that while you're on the road, driving is intense enough. There's so many reflexes you need to anticipate. You need to scan -- that you need to pay attention to, but there's not time for distractions, but as they're picking up from their parents at a young age that it's doable; it's possible, and it's common practice -- that is not setting a precedent that we want any teenagers to follow. And that, unfortunately is why a lot of the teenagers that come to Shepard end up here is because it's this cultural practice that distracted driving is okay -- that risk-taking is okay. So, that's what we really want parents to know that if you want your teenager to drive safely, please model that behavior from the get-go.
Melanie: That's great advice, and tell us about the accountability -- the parent and teen agreement --because we've heard that really you should make a contract with your child about texting and having too many friends in the car and that sort of thing. Tell us about the accountability factor.
Emma: So, the accountability factor goes both ways. So, we want the teenager to understand that driving is a privilege, and there's a lot of money that goes behind it, right? The insurance money, the cost of the car, the cost of petrol. But we also want the parent to understand that it is their responsibility to keep their teenagers safe throughout this process as well, and there's skills and ways that they can do that through compliance with the graduated driver's licensing laws, but also through increased supervision. So, the agreement that the parent and the teenager sign is customizable. So, they can fill in different sorts of things like -- IF we catch you texting, no more driving, or you are responsible for 50% of the gas cost for this month -- and setting standards that work for your family, and it's something that can be printed out and put on a magnet on your fridge, to guide, to process, and it keeps both parties accountable.
Melanie: That's wonderful news and as a parent, I applaud and appreciate this app. So, wrap it up for us, Emma, and give us your best advice about the Autocoach app, when it's going to be available, and what you would really like the listeners to know about the importance of teen driver safety.
Emma: So, this app is really the first app that gives you a concrete curriculum while tracking of the hours of supervised driving. So, it's going to make the process -- we hope -- as seamless as possible. We know this is a stressful time for parents and teens, but it's also a really, really important time to stress safety to your teenager before they go out into the world on their own and develop their own driving habits. So, at Shepard, we see an awful lot of tragic incidents happen that are completely preventable from distracted driving, texting and driving, from just taking your eyes off the road for one second. That's all it takes. So, I would just encourage everybody to focus on driving when they're driving. That’s really the most important thing, and especially when you're carrying your young kids around or teaching your teenagers how to drive. They are your most important asset, and we have to protect them as much as we can.
Melanie: Thank you so much Emma for such great information. You're listening to Shepard Center Radio and for more information on the Autocoach app, you can go to shepard.org. That's shepard.org. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening.