Hello everyone and for today's This Week in Cognitive Ergonomics video I want to talk about road safety. This is something that cognitive ergonomics plays a big role into. Think for instance you know when you drive your vehicle there's a lot of different interfaces, touchscreens, voice systems, buttons.
And so one of the potential possible job avenues for cognitive ergonomics experts is to work in automotive. in the automotive industry, as a human factors engineer or a UX engineer. And for every device in a car that the driver or the passenger may interact with, These systems need to undergo development and testing. Especially when it comes down to issues like driver distraction or fatigue. These systems have to be designed in a way that, at least in theory, don't make drivers more distracted and help them manage fatigue.
risk of getting into a crash is lower. Now why do I say in theory? This is because although a lot of work is being put into making this system safer, that's not always the case. So you may hop into a car that has been made in the last five to ten years and you see like massive touchscreens. In some of the cars, in addition to having a massive touchscreen, sometimes you can even watch videos while driving, which doesn't sound like a great idea, but it is possible.
And so these, of course, the type of devices or tasks that drivers complete when driving, they have a big impact on road safety. So what I wanted to talk about in this video is what is called a safe system approach. So what is a safe system approach?
It's part of this framework movement called Vision Zero. So Vision Zero. It started off as a movement in Europe in the 1990s and first year you know a lot of countries in Europe they have adopted this approach whose goal is to have zero fatalities, zero crashes on the road.
These Vision Zero as being municipalities in North America, so United States and Canada, have been trying to adopt these approach as well. As a matter of fact... The city of Windsor just a few years ago adopted a vision zero.
Now going back to the safe system approach, what it is, is contains a number of principles that They're very different from the way road safety has usually been done. Here on the City of Windsor website, for instance, you have a comparison between the traditional approach that has been ongoing for 100 years and the Vision Zero approach. So we can start with the first one. In the nutritional approach, traffic deaths are inevitable.
So because you have humans at the wheel of a car and humans make mistakes, then it's impossible to have zero deaths, zero fatalities on the road. Vision Zero approach turns that principle on its head and it says traffic deaths are in fact preventable. Traditional approach human behavior needs to be perfected. So if we don't want to see any collisions on the road, humans have to be perfect.
Which doesn't make sense because... Even in this course, we are talking about human cognition, and we know that human cognition, as humans, we make mistakes, we are not perfect. even if you remember from the previous lecture on the visual system how we are better at processing information presented to us in the center of the visual field but we're not as much you know as good as detecting information in the periphery so this principle which is like nonsense vision zero again it provides a completely different approach and say humans make mistakes. The traditional approach also say we must prevent collisions. So on the other hand what Vision Zero says is that we must prevent fatal and severe injuries.
So what Vision Zero states is that because humans make mistakes it's unavoidable that humans will see collisions. But what's more important then is not to eradicate collisions. What's more important than that is to prevent fatal and severe injuries. So collisions that lead to fatal and severe injuries.
And again, the attention is not even put on the collision itself, but instead of put on the real thing. result of the collisions so we must prevent fatal and severe injuries. According to the traditional approach road safety is an individual responsibility but according to Vision Zero road safety requires a system approach and that's where you know the safe system approach comes into play. Saving lives is expensive and Vision Zero says saving lives is not expensive. So why is the safe system approach within Vision Zero important from a cognitive ergonomics perspective?
Well, you know, the second principle of Vision Zero is humans make mistakes. And we must prevent fatal and severe injuries. And so it is important as cognitive ergonomics experts, maybe some of you will end up working, maybe not, if not for automotive manufacturing companies, maybe for suppliers, they have a role. in developing safe technology maybe some of you will end up working for the government for you know it will be a regulator so you know no matter the specific um you know job title or industry industry you're going to be working on.
Society, the entire system play a big role in reducing severe and fatal injuries. So understanding the human's brain and how humans behave and how to develop technologies that help. cope and make up for the human's limitations, that's very important for reducing severe and fatal injuries. So from a technology development perspective, it's important that for those of you who will be working for, say, Chrysler or Ford or any other, you know, say for suppliers like Magna or Continental or any of those.
If you're working in that industry as a cognitive ergonomic expert, it's important that technology in that case is developed in a way that takes into account the characteristics of the humans rather than imposing technology that you know the humans are going to misuse. What you see here is like a CBC article from earlier this year and we're actually collecting data on the moment. So we got funding from the federal government and we're working together with Windsor Police on a study investigating driver distraction. So we have students, we had them over the summer and now they're collecting data in the fall as well, standing near school zones.
and counting destructed drivers. You may have seen in the last couple of years some intersections in Windsor have red light cameras, for example. And this is...
part of the city's vision zero effort, in my understanding at least. And so with the work we're doing now with the Windsor Police, we're trying to get a better understanding what areas in Windsor show exhibit a higher prevalence of driver distraction. Not only people on the cell phone but also people texting, calling, using the touch screen and so forth and so on.
Going back to the Vision Zero approach, so it's not only mandatory, it's not only in everybody's interest to develop technology in the car that is safer. Again, watching YouTube while driving is probably not the safest behavior. But also from the perspective of city planners, their responsibility is to develop infrastructure that help.
reduce fatal and severe injuries. Stuff like reducing the speed limits or introducing infrastructure that discourage, for instance, speeding or the use of the cell phone while driving. Now, these, um, you know, what we're talking about right now, of course, Its primary area of application is driving and road safety.
But the same type of approach can be in fact used when talking about manufacturing or healthcare. instance we know that humans make mistakes so nurses doctors physicians you know health care practitioners in general they will make mistakes so instead of you know blaming the healthcare practitioners for making mistakes if you ever walked into you know hospital or like a room you'll see that there's a lot of technology there a lot of beeping and you know bells ringing how are physicians and nurses not expected to make mistakes in such a destruction heavy environment so the same sort of approach that deals with roads safety it's easily applicable to you know health care safety patient safety and manufacturing safety as a matter of fact We're currently in the lab, we're doing work with Atlas Copco, which is one of the largest tool manufacturers in the world, and they're interested in using principle of cognitive ergonomics to develop safer, more usable, less distracting technology products on the manufacturing floor. now the last study and whatnot you know um speaking of you know um drivers watching videos these you can find also another um A study on the CBC article, a CBC article on the work that we've done with the Minister of Transportation on what we call semi-autonomous vehicles like Cessna autopilot.
So the reason why... I'm telling you about this is not only because it's important to understand you know these vision zero approach and safe system approach but also because as cognitive ergonomics experts it's important for you to develop an understanding of how these issues that we're dealing with in class actually applies to the real world. The last thing I want to show you which is related to this is our lab, my lab's website.
So here is the HHS Lab website, Human Systems Lab website. And I have graduate, undergraduate, PhD. postgraduate students doing work in my lab.
We do a lot of work with industry, with government, in all sort of different fields. We're doing work in virtual reality right now we have Praneet is a research associate in the lab he's leading the effort in virtual reality developing virtual reality scenario for testing manufacturing and driving devices we do work in vehicle automation like briefly told you about the Tesla study we're working with Windsor police at the moment We're doing work understanding how humans behave in the real world. So what you see here is a cool video with a new eye tracker that we just purchased.
The red circle is gaze, so where people are looking with this. user is looking at. In this case the user is just walking in the hallways upstairs in the HK building but you know we actually do work you know all sort of different environment. All the work we do is with cognitive load assessment so You can review the information on your website. There's a lot as far as the people in the lab, the research that we're doing, the publication so that we're involved in.
And we're doing a lot of work. We're a very active research lab. So if you're interested in doing... research in getting more experience in doing research if you're thinking to do it now as an undergraduate student or if you are planning on going to grad school and you're interested in this field just please let me know so that's it for just this week in cognitive economics video i hope you enjoyed it and i wish you a good rest of the week bye