The prospect of automated vehicles (AVs) has generated excitement among the public and the research community about their potential to sustain the safe driving of people with dementia. However, no study to date has assessed the views of people with dementia on whether AVs may address their driving challenges.

This mixed-methods study included two phases, completed by nine people with dementia. Phase I included questionnaires and individual semistructured interviews on attitudes toward using different types of AVs (i.e., partially or fully automated). Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to assess participants' underlying reasons for and against AV use. The participants' identified reasons against AV use informed the focus group discussions in Phase II, where participants were asked to reflect on potential means of overcoming their hesitancies regarding AV use.

The results showed that people with dementia might place higher levels of trust in fully automated compared to partially automated AVs. In addition, while people with dementia expressed multiple incentives to use AVs (e.g., regaining personal freedom), they also had hesitations about AV use. These hesitancies were based on their perceptions about AVs (e.g., cost), their own abilities (i.e., potential challenges operating an AV), and driving conditions (i.e., risk of driving in adverse weather conditions).

The findings of this study can help promote the research community's appreciation and understanding of the significant potential of AVs for people with dementia while elucidating the potential barriers of AV use by people with dementia.

An updated systematic scoping review and narrative analysis of all possible mental health studies done during the concerned immediate years clarifies its present condition and status for all professionals, and concerned researchers.

To synthesize published mental health research studies in and for Saudi Arabia for the years 2009-2019 with the confidence to evaluate current situation, identify research gaps and limitations (if any), and assist in conceptualizing the forthcoming directions of future mental health research activities.

Scoping systematic review and modified narrative analysis were the methods utilized to achieve the aim and objective set for this formal academic endeavor.

Of the 1006 published studies identified from chosen databases, a total of 241 papers were included and had passed the stringent criteria set for the scoping review process. Basic characteristics of the reviewed studies were quantitative survey type with about 101-500 size range of respondents, utilizing non-patients and adults for participants which were common and randomly chosen from selected population, and most research activities were self-funded. Four major research themes were found including a list of research limitations.

This systematic scoping review identified a wide range of results characterizing the different studies that qualified using pre-determined inclusion-exclusion criteria. Though of increasing publication volume in the past decade, most researches done were quantitative survey type whose themes seemed to show no drastic difference or change from the previous years of output. More variety in research themes would further improve the over-all quality of mental health publications.

Scientific knowledge on autonomous-driving technology is expanding at a faster-than-ever pace. As a result, the likelihood of incurring information overload is particularly notable for researchers, who can struggle to overcome the gap between information processing requirements and information processing capacity. We address this issue by adopting a multi-granulation approach to latent knowledge discovery and synthesis in large-scale research domains. The proposed methodology combines citation-based community detection methods and topic modelling techniques to give a concise but comprehensive overview of how the autonomous vehicle (AV) research field is conceptually structured. Thirteen core thematic areas are extracted and presented by mining the large data-rich environments resulting from 50 years of AV research. The analysis demonstrates that this research field is strongly oriented towards examining the technological developments needed to enable the widespread rollout of AVs, whereas it largely overlooks the wide-ranging sustainability implications of this sociotechnical transition. On account of these findings, we call for a broader engagement of AV researchers with the sustainability concept and we invite them to increase their commitment to conducting systematic investigations into the sustainability of AV deployment. Sustainability research is urgently required to produce an evidence-based understanding of what new sociotechnical arrangements are needed to ensure that the systemic technological change introduced by AV-based transport systems can fulfill societal functions while meeting the urgent need for more sustainable transport solutions.

Walking is a common form of physical activity and is the most frequent way to access public transit. On-going changes in the US transportation system are occurring, notably increases in smartphone application-based ridesharing. The goal of this research is to assess whether increasing use of ridesharing was associated with a change in transit-related walking. This is important to both public health and transportation, as it can inform changes in active transportation which promotes both physical activity and transit use.

We examined the association between change in transit use, transit-related walking, and ridesharing nationally and for selected metropolitan areas using the 2009 and 2017 National Household Travel Survey (≥18 years; n = 263,572 and n = 230,592, respectively). Analyses were conducted in 2019. Covariates included sex, age, race/ethnicity, education, employment, work from home, household size, number of vehicles, population density, Census region, metro area size and heavy rail transit category and season.

The national prevalence of transit use in the past month in 2009 was 16.9% (95% CI: 16.4%-17.4%) and in 2017 was 16.1% (15.6%-16.6%), a significant decrease (p < 0.02). The prevalence of daily transit-related walking in 2009 was 4.2% (4.0%-4.4%) and in 2017 was 4.4% (4.2%-4.6%; p = 0.22). The prevalence of daily taxi use in 2009 was 0.5% (0.4%-0.6%) and taxi/rideshare in 2017 was 1.1% (1.0%-1.2%), a significant increase (p < 0.0001). The relationships remained after covariate adjustment. Finally, there was not a significant change in transit-related walking or interaction between year and taxi/rideshare use after additional adjustment for taxi/rideshare. Changes in transit-related walking in metros were largely not significant, whereas increases in taxi/rideshare were largely significant.

Results suggest that increased use of ridesharing may not be linked with changes in transit-related walking. Continued surveillance of travel mode prevalence is required to track potential reductions in population-level physical activity with technology-related changes in travel.