University of Saskatchewan hopes to become Canada’s first state of the art road safety research hub

If all goes as planned, by September the University of Saskatchewan could have the Country’s first state-of-the-art road safety research hub.

It will be located in the Health Sciences Building and will contain both car and truck simulators. Gerontologist and Assistant Professor, Dr. Alexander Crizzle will lead the research that will include assessing and rehabilitating high risk drivers.

That includes potentially training younger or new drivers, and also assessing elderly drivers who have a deterioration in skills, or who have experienced a traumatic episode—like a stroke.

“If you have a stroke, typically you have your license suspended and you’re allowed to regain your license when you regain those (driving) skills, and a simulator can be used as a training mechanism to kind of improve those skills and will hopefully lead to someone regaining their license again over time,” he explained.

Driving simulators have come a long way in the last 20 years, Crizzle said. They weren’t very good back then, and there wasn’t a lot of translation from the lab to real world driving.

“As the technology has improved we’re seeing a much better similarity between the task of driving in a simulator and a vehicle,” he explained.”It’s not a perfect science still, but we can literally duplicate an exact city on a simulator and have someone practice driving… the skills are very much transferable that what they used to be.”

The truck simulator will be used as well in behavioral research, including assessing how fatigue affects the body, or how cannabis affects driving skills.

“We can essentially link it to virtual devices- VR- Virtual Reality, EEGs and EMGs. We can pretty much do what we want with these simulators,” Crizzle said.

He adds that the simulators can also be used for infrastructure and intersection design, like finding out how a new lanes or traffic conditions could affect drivers.

“From a city stand point, if you’re looking at introducing bike lanes, we can actually test if they’re going to work well or not. And it’s a lot cheaper option of testing it on a simulator, than just implementing it and finding out a couple of years down the road that it’s just not going to work,” he said.

The simulators should be delivered in late July.