Professors Tiago Falk of INRS and Sébastien Tremblay of Université Laval win prestigious NSERC Innovation Award

QUEBEC CITY, Nov. 6, 2024 /CNW/ – Professor Tiago Falk, a specialist in wireless multimedia communications at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), and Professor Sébastien Tremblay, a researcher in cognitive psychology at Université Laval, have been awarded the 2024 Synergy Award for Innovation in the University Partnerships category by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Working with private-sector partner Thales, as well as the École nationale de police du Québec and the Centre de recherche et d’innovation en sécurité civile du Québec (Centre RISC), the pair of researchers has succeeded in developing “operator functional state” assessment models based on physiological and behavioural data collected in real time using wearable sensors. In the first response and public safety world, “operator functional state,” or OFS, refers to the availability of required psychophysiological resources to perform a task or set of tasks as part of an operation. It takes into account multiple sources of information, including but not limited to mental workload, mental and physical fatigue, stress, anxiety, and physical activity.

“This award recognizes the results we’ve achieved with our partners over the past decade to help Canadian first responders be the best they can be. It’s both humbling and exciting to see our stress detection tools being used by front-line professionals like nurses, police officers, and public safety officers to directly improve mental health and indirectly make Canadians’ lives better,” says Professor Falk, Scientific Head of the Multimedia/Multimodal Signal Analysis and Enhancement Laboratory (MuSAE Lab).

“These results show that Canada is at the forefront of applying signal processing and AI for the benefit of society,” adds the researcher who is also a member of the INRS-UQO Joint Research Unit in Cybersecurity.

“Today, there are a host of connected apps—on watches, for example—that promise they can read our psychological state and emotions from measurements such as heart rate,” adds Professor Tremblay, who is also Director of the Co-DOT Lab. “Our scientific and technical challenge was to develop valid and reliable indicators of a person’s psychological, cognitive, or affective state based on physiological measurements. We were able to take on this challenge thanks to multidisciplinary collaboration, the synergy between our teams, the students who took part in the project, and our partners.”

Technological advances bring cognitive challenges

With the rise of smart cities around the world, smart urban security has emerged as a field, where sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) systems are deployed around the city to allow security forces to handle incidents and coordinate emergency response by fire and police departments, first responders, and private operators. Typically, these systems are connected to an integrated operations control centre that provides real-time decision support and manages incident response resources.

However, as technology advances, control centre operators are facing numerous cognitive challenges like information overload, multitasking, interruptions, and fatigue, all of which place stresses on operators’ cognitive systems and reduce the efficiency with which their complex set of tasks is performed. What’s more, first responders like police officers, firefighters, and paramedics are also exposed to a combination of physical and mental factors that contribute to high mental workloads, stress, and fatigue, increasing the risk of errors that in many cases can be life-threatening.

Tools at the service of society

Professors Falk and Tremblay collected important datasets that enabled the development of cognitive AI models to predict the OFS of first responders, as well as parameters like their stress, anxiety, fatigue, and mental workload. The partners then used these models to quantify the impact of different strategies on reducing officer stress, as well as to monitor OFS levels while responders are in the field.

The models have been deployed and used by the Canadian Space Agency, the RCMP, Public Safety Canada, and the Canadian Air Force to keep Canadians safe. The developed tools have also been used in hospitals to track nurse and doctor burnout, as well as to monitor patients who were quarantining at home alone during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Synergy Awards for Innovation are an annual award to highlight innovation and the benefits of joining forces to make the most of Canadian ingenuity.

About INRS
INRS is an academic institution dedicated exclusively to graduate research and training in strategic sectors in Quebec. For the past 55 years, it has actively contributed to Quebec’s economic, social, and cultural development. INRS is first in Canada in research intensity. It is made up of four interdisciplinary research and training centres located in Quebec City, Montreal, Laval, and Varennes, which focus their efforts on strategic sectors: water, earth, and environment (Eau Terre Environnement Research Centre); energy, materials, and telecommunications (Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre); urbanization, culture, and society (Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre); and health and biotechnology (Armand-Frappier Santé Biotechnologie Research Centre). The INRS community includes over 1,500 students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty and staff members.

About Université Laval

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SOURCE Institut National de la recherche scientifique (INRS)