Transcript
[Caroll Lau, Human Factors Specialist:]
Throughout high school, I was always interested in how people think, and what's going on in their mind. Like human factors, cognitive psychology. It's very niche. I just find it so interesting.
I'm Caroll Lau, and I'm a human factors specialist at Transport Canada.
When I talk to people about road safety, they're like, oh yeah. Distraction. Yeah. Don't text and drive. But distraction can come from so many other sources, like the billboards on the road, for example. It could come from poor design of a vehicle dashboard. If you're really anxious versus when you're angry versus when you're sad and happy, it really influences things that you see on the road.
Human factors is a multi-disciplinary science that basically studies the interaction between a human and the product or environment that they're interacting with.
The driving simulator allows us to do research in a controlled environment. It collects driving performance, such as the drivers speed and how they interact in the road. We couple it with an eye tracker. So the eye tracker basically could see where the driver is looking.
We're interested in the HMI. So the human machine interaction and the types of warnings and icons that is in the vehicle, what kind of messaging does it do, where the messages are located on the dashboard? Trying to see if the display is distracting. Is it so distracting to the point where the driver just ignores it over time?
With the research, we basically feed it into helping develop the standards and guidelines and eventually help inform regulations and policies
At Transport Canada, I'm able to apply what I learned in school a lot. Like I mentioned from my Master's, I used the driving simulator, I studied psychology, and the research that I work on uses all of that information.
Our job is to make sure that even though this technology is out there that's ever changing, we want to make sure that it's safe for Canadians to use.