IMMORTAL (Impaired Motorists, Methods of Roadside Testing and Assessment for Licensing) is a special research programme dealing with the accident risk associated with different forms of driver impairment. These objectives focus on two problem areas: (a) Chronic impairment, resulting from physical illness, mental illness, or physical deficiencies. This aspect has got important impact on driver licensing. (b) Acute impairment as a result of medicines, drugs and alcohol (alone or in combination of each other). This mode of impairment concerns first of all the traffic act. IMMORTAL attempts to find a considerably more accurate risk assessment with the potential aim to identify “tolerance levels”, which can be applied to licensing assessment and roadside impairment testing (and also drug screening). IMMORTAL has got the following technical and scientific objectives: • Investigation of the influence of chronic and acute impairment on driver’s performance and the accident risk related to it; • Recommendation of criteria (“tolerance levels”) for high risk categories of impairment; • Provision of key information to support formulation of European Policy on licensing and roadside testing. IMMORTAL is innovative in case of several aspects: • The multi-disciplinary expertise and European representation of the consortium, • The range of impairment factors considered and the comprehensive nature of the research; • The inclusion of a User Representation Panel, • The relevance to EU policy and standardisation, • The range of research methodologies applied, • The specification, verification, and exploitation of testing and assessment protocols, and • The methods of dissemination and exploitation of programme results. IMMORTAL started on 1 January 2002 and lasted till 30 June 2005. The work-plan is structured in “work-packages”. This report is structured as follows: First, the project procedure and the project areas are described. After this, all the results of the IMMORTAL research areas are brought together in a separate chapter. Yet another section deals with the recommendations and the exploitable results. Annex 1-3 includes the executive summaries of all IMMORTAL deliverables. Further information about IMMORTAL can be found on the website see http://www.immortal.or.at/ (Author/publisher)
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