Andrea Thinnes, OTD, Assistant Professor of Occupational Therapy, has recently helped to oversee Carfit, a program desiged to help drivers over the age of sixty-five sit comfortably in their vehicles. “Sometimes when we age, our bodies change and we need different things. We might need a seat that gets moved a little bit closer to the front or maybe we do not have enough space between the driver and steering wheel,” Thinnes said of the event.
The fastest growing group of people in the United States are people over the age of sixty-five, and without including teenage statistics they have the highest crash death rate per mile. While this program was being piloted in the spring of 2005, they found that over one third of these drivers has at least one critical problem needing to be taken care of. Approximately one in five of the mature drivers could not see at least three inches over the steering wheel. This was the first Carfit event in Nebraska, and another one is being planned for the Spring 2010.