סמינר המחלקה להנדסה ביו רפואית- הרצאת אורח -ד"ר סער גולן

Drivers impaired thermal comfort assessment may present novel opportunities in transportation safety

  Dr.Saar Golan*

Car accidents represent a major global death cause. It is well-documented that human Thermal Comfort (TC) is strongly correlated with improved disposition, performance at work, reduced fatigue, etc. We thus set forth to evaluate TC effects on driver performance. In this talk I will introduce our findings. We established an environment mimicking driving conditions - test room emulating the car physical settings and a simulation software imitating road driving (OpenDS, with our own programmed urban maps and graded road obstacles). We fabricated a microelectronics platform sampling driver and environmental parameters in real time (body/room temperature, heart rate, relative humidity, radiation, etc.). We used the acquired data to continuously evaluate drivers Fanger’s Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) index of TC, which we correlated with their performance (graded driving errors) and subjective satisfaction (estimated using questionnaires filled during the experiments). We observed that drivers exhibit reduced ability to assess their TC. Discomfort is typically noticed with significant time delay, leading to a lacking correction behavior of the driver thermal environment. Drivers subjected to discomfort display reduced performance accompanied by a subjective feeling of fatigue (PMV is linearly correlated with the number of driving errors). Thus, making TC potentially a compelling predictor of transportation safety. We conclude that while current car alert systems typically inform drivers seconds ahead, TC monitoring is complementary insofar as it can significantly extend the alert window by raising drivers’ awareness when comfort drops below acceptable thresholds.

Dr. Saar Golan received his engineering degrees from the Technion and Weizmann Institute. He is faculty at Ariel University (Chemical and Mechanical Engineering departments) and an adjunct member at the Technion (Biomedical Engineering) since 2014. Dr. Golan is the head of the Bio-analytical Microsystems Lab in Ariel. His research interests involve mechanobiology and thermoregulation.

*Bio-Analytical Microsystems Lab

Department of Chemical Engineering

Ariel University