NIH funds smartphone platform to improve driving safety for teens with ADHD

Teenagers with ADHD crash cars at rates that alarm public health researchers. They speed. They brake hard. They get distracted. The condition that makes it difficult to focus in a classroom makes it exponentially more dangerous behind the wheel, where attention, quick decision-making, and the ability to manage multiple tasks simultaneously are not optional. Motor vehicle crashes remain the leading cause of death among American teenagers, and those with ADHD face an even steeper cliff.

Now a team of researchers and entrepreneurs is building a tool to help. Dr. Jeffrey Keller at LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Sara Seifert, president of Minnesota HealthSolutions, have received a $353,306 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to develop a smartphone platform designed to make teen drivers with ADHD safer. The award, part of the NIH's Small Business Innovation Research program, funds a collaboration to create what amounts to a digital co-pilot: a system that watches how a young driver behaves on the road, feeds that data back to parents and the teen in real time, and helps them all work together toward safer habits.

The platform, an extension of earlier work called StreetCoach that was developed for older drivers, will use smartphone-based telematics—essentially, sensors and software that track driving patterns. It will monitor acceleration, braking, speed, and other behaviors associated with crashes. But the real innovation lies in what happens with that data. Rather than simply collecting numbers, the system will help parents and teens set shared goals, receive personalized coaching based on actual driving patterns, and watch their progress unfold. The app will also give physicians a clearer window into how ADHD specifically affects driving performance, potentially informing better treatment decisions.

The scale of the problem justifies the investment. Louisiana alone carries the highest motor vehicle insurance costs in the country. Nationally, traffic crashes impose $10.5 billion in economic costs annually. But the human cost is what drives the research: teenagers are dying. Those with ADHD are dying at higher rates. Driving requires sustained attention, working memory, the ability to multitask, and the capacity to respond physically in milliseconds. ADHD disrupts all of these. The condition doesn't make a teen a bad driver—it makes the ordinary demands of driving neurologically harder.

Keller's team has already proven the concept works. The earlier StreetCoach program for older adults evaluated more than 11,000 real-world drives and demonstrated that digital monitoring could identify risky behaviors and that personalized interventions actually changed how people drove. That work generated peer-reviewed publications and established the technical and scientific foundation for expanding to a new population: teenagers learning to drive while managing ADHD.

The new project will move quickly. Over the next year, researchers will build a prototype and test it with actual families—parents and teens with ADHD—to make sure the platform actually addresses what they need. The team is deliberately involving families throughout development rather than building in isolation and hoping it works. The Phase I work is expected to wrap up in spring 2027, after which the team will pursue larger clinical studies and work toward getting the product into the hands of families who need it.

What makes this different from a simple monitoring app is the partnership model. Keller and his collaborators are not just researchers publishing papers. They are building a commercial product designed to reach families at scale. The NIH SBIR program exists precisely to move discoveries out of the laboratory and into the real world, where they can actually save lives. A smartphone in a teenager's car, connected to a parent's phone, feeding data to a doctor's office—this is the kind of infrastructure that could reshape how families manage the intersection of ADHD and the terrifying responsibility of learning to drive.