No research studies prior to 2013 had actually compared the two texting methods in an actual driving environment, so Christine Yager, an associate transportation researcher, conducted a study to determine if either method was safer than the other. Sponsored by the Southwest Region University Transportation Center, the first-of-its-kind study was based on the performance of 43 research participants driving an actual vehicle on a closed course. Other research efforts have evaluated manual versus voice activated tasks using devices installed in a vehicle, but the TTI analysis is the first to compare voice-to-text and manual texting on a handheld device in an actual driving environment.