In this episode, Elizabeth O’Neal, a transportation safety expert and CPH assistant professor, discusses her research on pedestrian safety, particularly in relation to driverless vehicles and children. She explains that her research uses virtual environments to study how children interact with traffic and make crossing decisions. She also discusses the implications of driverless technology and the need for clear communication between autonomous vehicles and pedestrians, especially children. 

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Lauren Lavin:

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to From the Front Row. If this is your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student run podcast that talks about the major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone, both inside and outside of the field of public health. I’m your host, Lauren Lavin, and in today’s episode, we’re exploring a topic that’s kind of on the cutting edge of innovation and safety: driverless vehicles and children and teenagers. As these autonomous cars are becoming more prevalent on our roads today, there’s been a lot of questions about safety, particularly when it comes to our most vulnerable passengers and people on the street: children.

So to help us navigate this complex issue, we are really excited to have a very special guest joining us. We have Dr. Elizabeth O’Neal and she’s a leading expert in transportation safety and a professor at the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Dr. O’Neal has dedicated years of research to understanding the implication of driverless technology and has been at the forefront of studying how these vehicles interact with children using virtual environments. So today we’re going to be discussing the current state of driverless technology, how she studies driverless technology, policy implications, and even some actionable tips for our listeners going forward. So buckle up and join us for this insightful conversation that promises to be informative as it is timely. And with that, welcome to the show, Dr. O’Neal.

Thank you, Dr. Elizabeth O’Neal, for joining us today. We are so happy to have you on the podcast. To start off, could you start by introducing yourself and talking a little bit about your role at the University of Iowa.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Thank you, Lauren, for having me. I’m so excited to be here today and talk to you about the work that we’ve been doing on child pedestrians. I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Community and Behavioral Health here at the University of Iowa.

Lauren Lavin:

What initially sparked your research on this pedestrian safety? How long have you been doing it? And most recently, I think you’ve been focusing specifically on children and driverless vehicles, which obviously probably weren’t around when you started your research. So what sparked this particular interest for you?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Well, you’re certainly right that this was not an issue that was around when I first started doing research in child pedestrian safety, so just a little bit of background. I began doing work on pedestrian safety at the University of Alabama at Birmingham while I was earning my second bachelor’s and applying to graduate school, while managing a lab that was using virtual environments to teach children how to cross streets safely. At that time, I thought that I was going to be a clinician and quickly learned that I really enjoyed research and I thought that virtual environments were a really, really awesome way to do research on something that’s dangerous, so how children crossroads with traffic. And that inspired my decision to apply to the University of Iowa and get my PhD in developmental psychology over in the Department of Psychology, at the time, which is now Psychological and Brain Sciences. But yes, so I’ve been doing this work for quite a long time. Maybe I shouldn’t date myself by saying how long, but I did start doing this work at the University of Iowa in 2011.

Lauren Lavin:

Wow. Did you say two bachelor’s degrees?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

I love that. And you started at the University of Alabama, you said?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Well, my first bachelor’s is for Mississippi State University …

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

In communications with an emphasis in public relations.

Lauren Lavin:

Got it.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

And then I went out into the workforce and decided that I wanted to go to graduate school in psychology. So after some time in the workforce, I should say. And then went back in psychology and sort of kismet wound up in a lab that was doing work in virtual environments that I really, really enjoyed. So it was kind of letting my experiences guide my future, which I think is so important. But yeah, so here I am now, second bachelor’s in psychology. While I started my PhD here at the University of Iowa, I quickly discovered that a lot of injury work was happening in the College of Public Health. So smack in the middle of my PhD program. I enrolled in the Master’s of Public Health program here as well and got my master’s in 2016, PhD in 2018, continued on to a postdoc both in Psychological and Brain Sciences and at what was formally the National Advanced Driving Simulator, currently the Driving Safety Research Institute.

Lauren Lavin:

Oh my goodness. I always love hearing everyone’s different paths because it’s so interesting. Especially in the PhD world, the way that people get to where they are is fascinating. It’s always good to hear, especially for students that are listening, that there is not one linear path.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Most of the people that you talk to will tell you the same thing.

Lauren Lavin:

Yep. And it’s always enlightening to hear that. Could you talk a little bit about your recent research studies that you have done in these areas of pedestrian safety? I’m leaving that question intentionally broad. Talk about whatever you want and give us as much detail or as little as you’d like and then we’ll get into the specifics.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Right. Well, I mean, I’ve done quite a lot of work in this sphere, and my first project really just looked at the ages at which children begin to look adult-like in their road crossing skill. And interestingly, we tested children age 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, and adults and we found that children don’t look adult-like in their road crossing, using the virtual environment, until they’re 14. Now that doesn’t mean that kids can’t cross roads at earlier ages, but they certainly don’t look like adults until that time. So that tells us …

Lauren Lavin:

Do you mean physically look like adults or they don’t use skills that adults use when crossing the road?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Both.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

So I’m going to get really science-y on you here.

Lauren Lavin:

No, you should.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Very psychology on you. I should say there are two parts to my research. There’s a very basic component to my research, where I’m looking at behavioral mechanisms and how they contribute to injury risk, and then there’s this second piece, which is the applied piece, and so I like to make the bridge between the two. Using that information about those basic behavioral mechanisms and how they impact injury is a point for intervention. And so some of the work that I’ve done is very basic in nature, trying to figure out when do children look like adults. What about that? What about that behavior puts them at risk? And so we see there that children don’t make decisions about road crossing the same way that adults do. They also don’t time their movement the same way that adults do.

Lauren Lavin:

Right.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

So it’s a perception action problem that they don’t look the same as adults until they’re older.

Lauren Lavin:

Got it. Now I’m on the same page.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Okay. Great. So we’ve done work just looking at that, looking at when children look adult-like in their road crossing. We’ve also looked at the impact of how crossing with friends increases risk, particularly among early adolescents as we know that there are systems in the brain that really enjoy risk when you’re at that age and your cognitive network isn’t quite well-developed at that time, making it even more risky. We have looked at how parents teach children to cross roads safely. What mechanisms do parents employ? What sort of scaffolding techniques do they use? We’ve looked at how children with ADHD differ from typically developing children in the way that they cross roads with traffic. The list goes on, but that’s kind of the basic side. In an applied perspective, we’ve looked at how sending mobile alerts or sending permissive and prohibitive alerts to your mobile phone can impact your road crossing.

We can tell you when, “A safe gap is approaching and now is a good time to cross.” We can tell you when is not a good time to cross if you begin and how people adhere to that. We’ve also looked at how crossing with virtual agents can make you a riskier or a safer crosser. We’ve looked at how augmented reality, which you could use on your phone can also alert you to whether or not a safe gap is available for crossing. And we’ve done this in all sorts of populations. We’ve done it in children, adults, and even older adults as well.

Lauren Lavin:

When you do some of this research, when I say environment, are you doing it in a suburban Iowa setting? Are you doing it in an urban population like Chicago? What kind of crosswalk are we setting people in?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Sure. We do this in a suburban neighborhood.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Most of our experiments, although not all, are done on a one-way street with just a single lane of traffic.

Lauren Lavin:

Got it.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

We have different virtual environment systems. So we have a large-screen virtual environment, which is a three-walled room with the screens placed at 90 degree angles to one another. And so they’re roughly, I think … I can’t give you the exact dimensions, but a little over 10 feet. The front screen is a little over 10 feet wide and the side screens are roughly 14 feet long, and that provides people with enough space to physically cross a single lane of traffic. It’s very immersive. We can show you in-stereo, which makes the objects appear in 3D, so it really feels like the cars are in the volume of the cave. And quickly, I should certainly make a plug to the Hank Lab, where I did this work as a graduate student and continue to collaborate with two fabulous principal investigators, Jody Plumert, who’s in Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Joe Kearney in the Department of Computer Science.

They are really responsible for these virtual environment systems. I just came in and, as a student, was able to run all sorts of fantastic experiments in them. So we have that large screen environment, as I mentioned, and then we also have a head-mounted display unit. So I’m sure lots of people are now familiar with the Meta Oculus systems, HTC Vives. We also use those systems as well and we can have you cross lots of lanes of traffic. The biggest limitation for virtual environment research is the physical space in which we can do it.

Lauren Lavin:

Right. Okay. That makes sense. Has all of your research always incorporated the use of virtual reality simulations or has it ever actually involved crossing a physical space crosswalk?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

So for the road crossing, it’s always been virtual. Oh. Well, I take that back. So up until recently, it’s been virtual. Last year, we received some pilot funding from the Injury Prevention Research Center that’s housed here in the College of Public Health to do some naturalistic road crossing work, so we have parents and children crossing roads together. And the purpose of this study is really to see how parents talk to children and teach them how to crossroads in the real world environment because there’s no evidence to suggest how parents do this. So we have them wear … It’s called a DJI Action 2. It’s very similar to a GoPro, but much smaller. And we have them wear them with a head strap and a baseball cap on their head so that we can see where they’re looking, we can capture the environment, we can capture what they’re saying to one another.

We’re coding that information now. We’re continuing to enroll parents and their six and eight-year-old children to do that study. So we’re starting to move into the more observational naturalistic work, but there’s a trade-off, right? So in a virtual environment, we can tightly control everything in the environment: the size of the gaps, the density of the traffic, the speed of the traffic, the type of environment that they’re crossing in. We have far less control over that in a naturalistic environment.

Lauren Lavin:

Right.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Which as psychologists, we love to have experimental control because then we’re really able to sort of drill down to the specific behaviors that we’re interested in. But on the opposite end of this, I think there’s a lot of beauty in discovery science, right? So gathering data and then seeing what the data have to show you. I mean, I think it needs to be theoretically driven and we need to have hypotheses, and we do, but we’re also kind of letting the data speak to us and show us what’s there.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. Absolutely. So you also talked about some research determining how children and teenagers kind of decide when it’s safe to cross the road, especially with oncoming self-driving cars. So what were some of the main findings with that particular research?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Absolutely. So I’ll just kind of walk you through, from start to finish, what our thought process is here and then what we found. So this was our most recent publication that came out and we have a great consortium that we were working with, five universities, and we were called the Safer SIM University Transportation Center that was funded by the USDOT, which is what funded this project. We had such great collaborators and idea generators that are all working in the simulation space, and one thing that everyone’s talking about in that space is driverless vehicles, autonomous vehicles, right? They’re here. They’re growing in number. They’re going to become really important. But as pedestrians, when we cross roads with traffic, we use both explicit and implicit cues to make our crossing decisions, and particularly to determine if a car actually plans to stop and allow us to cross.

So for those of us at the University of Iowa, a really good example might be on the T. Anne Cleary Walkway, crossing Market or Jefferson.

Lauren Lavin:

Yep.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

You have to look to traffic and make sure that those cars are going to stop for you. So one of the ways that we do that is we can look at the implicit cues that are provided by cars, which is like their deceleration rate. “That car looks like it’s slowing down. They’re probably going to stop for me. Maybe I will cross. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I don’t trust that they will do that.” We also use explicit cues, which is you make eye contact with that driver. “They see me. They are going to stop for me.” Maybe they give you a little nod of their head or a small wave to let you know, “I’m going to stop for you. It’s safe for you to cross.”

But in the case of an autonomous/driverless vehicle, there is no driver in the seat that can give you that kind of communication, so how cars communicate their intent to vulnerable road users is an important question that many people are studying right now. So those explicit cues, as I said, are missing, and so lots of researchers and car manufacturers have been testing different systems that are called external human machine interfaces, and I’ll just call those EHMIs from here on out.

Lauren Lavin:

Got it.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Because it’s a mouthful otherwise. But they’ve been testing all sorts of different EHMIs. So flashing LEDs that race at different speeds to indicate when the car will stop for you or if it’s going to stop for you, various plays on current pedestrian signaling and traffic signaling, like a “Walk, don’t walk,” the pedestrian sign, et cetera, which you might find at an intersection.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

There have also been systems that have displayed eyes on the windshield of the car that look to the pedestrian, almost like a driver would. So there’s been a lot of variation out there in what people have done, and with that variation comes varying levels of understanding on the parts of pedestrians, as you can imagine.

Lauren Lavin:

Right. Okay.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

So we chose to use a very straightforward system, red light, green light, to indicate that the car was telling you it’s safe to cross. We’ll talk a little bit more and I can get it more into that in a minute. So there are these studies that have been looking at how people interpret these various EHMI systems. Very few have looked at how adults, and especially children, interact with these systems, but even fewer have looked at how pedestrians integrate these implicit and explicit cues together. So if the car begins to decelerate from a far distance gradually, when does the EHMI need to come on to communicate its intent? If it stops abruptly, when does it need to communicate its intent? How we integrate those cues matters. Very few studies have looked at how children interact with EHMIs, period, so we were really interested in how they integrate these two cues. And on our part, we used two cues, an implicit and an explicit.

So the first cue was deceleration, so when it was approaching, and we had cars that either decelerated gradually, so they started slowing from a distance, versus abruptly. And I think that, if I remember correctly, the gradual deceleration began seven seconds before the car arrived at the stopping point, which is right in front of our pedestrian, or it began a little over three seconds before it came to a stop. The second cue that we used was the EHMI signal that turned from red to green to signal that the car intended to yield. So red, meaning, “Pedestrian, don’t go,” green, meaning, “You can go.” And in our experiment, we didn’t explicitly tell adults or children what the colors meant. They just had to figure it out. And I can say they did. They totally understood it, which was good.

Lauren Lavin:

Right.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

And so the light, we manipulated so that it either came on early or it came on late, which just meant that it came on after the car came to a stop. So that was kind of the experimental design and the background, sort of the justification for our question.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. So then how did that introduction of the light influence children’s crossing behavior?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Right. So it’s really interesting. I should mention we tested kids that were eight to 12 years old, and they just stood next to the edge of the roadway. They saw a pair of cars. They knew that the tail car was a driverless car and that they had to cross between. We also told them that there was a light on top that would communicate, but we didn’t tell them how it worked. We found that in our qualitative interviews that the children and adults understood the light really well, but how they interacted and made their crossing decisions really depended on both the light and the deceleration of the vehicle, so we saw an interesting interaction there. So what we saw was that when cars decelerating gradually and the green light came on early, children entered the road well before the car came to a complete stop, which is a little scary.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

But when the green light came on late, whether it be decelerating gradually or abruptly, children waited for that light to turn green before entering the roadway. So they kind of treated it just like they would a crosswalk signal. “The light says I can go. I will go,” which we thought was really quite interesting. Adults on the other hand, even in the early condition, wait a little bit later than kids before entering the roadway.

Lauren Lavin:

Interesting. Okay. Now, do driverless vehicles that are on the road today have some sort of light on them or is that just something you guys piloted for the purpose of this study?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

That is something that we piloted for the purpose of this study.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

So there are no standards for how these cars should communicate with pedestrians and other vulnerable road users at this time.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

And that’s the world that we’re living in. Technology moves so quickly that it’s hard for policy to keep up.

Lauren Lavin:

Yep. Oh, yeah, I know all about that, and I’m sure we’ll get to this in a little bit because I have a couple of policy questions. I want to talk a little bit more about self-driving cars now.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

With the expected increase in self-driving cars, what do you see as some potential safety concerns for pedestrians and especially children as we see the increase in them on the road?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Right. Well, I think there are safety concerns for both adults and children and I think the message is kind of the same. But I think it is really important to understand that children interact with traffic differently than adults and the systems that we create need to accommodate the most vulnerable among us: children and older adults, but particularly children. And I think it’s also important to remember that in this study, we only looked at a single lane of traffic, but traffic environments are typically much more complex than that …

Lauren Lavin:

Absolutely.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

And are going to have a mixed fleet. So you’re going to have some vehicles that are driverless, some that have human drivers, and we’re all interacting with each other. And that’s where ambiguity comes in, right? And so as these driverless cars become more common, I think it’s important that pedestrians remember these systems fail, they’re not fail-safe, and then that we need to make sure that we don’t offload our decisions completely onto the technology that’s available to us. So if a driverless vehicle does communicate with you that it’s going to stop, it doesn’t mean that the car in the next lane will stop for you. So you still need to be aware of everything that’s happening on the roadway in order to make decisions and cross safely. And some of our other work has shown that if you provide people with technology that tells them when to cross, they will completely offload their cognition and decisions onto the technology and spend very little time attending to traffic, which is a little scary.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. I mean, I feel like sometimes I can do that some days too.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

So I can attest to that if I’m not being careful too. Okay. So then how do you envision driverless cars in a perfect world, communicating pedestrians to ensure safety? So obviously, you guys tested this dome light. Do you think that that’s the best way for them to communicate? Is there a better way that you see? What do you think?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Yeah. I mean, I think that our system is a good system. I don’t think it’s the only good system. In our paper, we looked at others that were also pretty intuitive. I think what is really important is that our work and other work has shown that whatever the EHMI is that is used, it needs to be something that’s familiar. So things that we already use in the roadway environment, like red lights and green lights, walk, don’t walk. I think some of the systems that people have found more confusing have been the eyeballs that are looking at people or the flashing LEDs. They’re just not as intuitive, right? So using existing signals that we already know and understand, I think, is really important. One thing that we thought a lot about in our study is that even though red light, green light is used by everyone, it’s not necessarily color friendly and we haven’t tested that in people with colorblindness, so there may be a better alternative than what we have used.

But I think the important message is these systems need to be simple in order for people to interpret them. I know you have some policy questions so I don’t want to get too far into that, but I think making sure that these communications come on at a time that maximizes safety is important. Because I think a lot of what technology offers us is the ability to sort of improve traffic flow, improve the speed at which we’re able to do things safely. But when it comes to children, I think turning the light on early may mean that kids get to enter the road sooner and cross the road sooner, and that car goes faster. But I think that we sacrifice safety in doing that.

Lauren Lavin:

Right. Yeah. Is that always better? Yeah. I don’t know if that’s always better. Yeah. I don’t know if you know the answer to this, but do driverless vehicles have the capability for passengers inside to override?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Many do, yeah. So it depends. I mean, think that the ideal right is to meet our sci-fi vision for what driverless vehicles can be. You get in the back of the car.,You read the book, you do your work on your laptop, you have a chat with your friend, and you don’t have to worry about what’s happening on the roadway. We’re not there yet, in my opinion. I mean, I know there are driverless cars that can do that.

Lauren Lavin:

Right.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

I think there’s a system out in Phoenix where …

Lauren Lavin:

Yep. The Waze ones, is that what it’s called?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Yeah. Yeah. But they’ve had problems. They’re not perfect.

Lauren Lavin:

Nope.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

And I think that’s important to remember. But those systems, I don’t think, have a driver.

Lauren Lavin:

Those don’t.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

There’s not anybody. But if you look at something like a Tesla … And they’re not at the highest level of automation. People often make the mistake of thinking that their Tesla can do all of it. It cannot. But in the cases where you do engage those … I don’t want to call them driverless features, but those more autonomous features, yes. You do have the ability to override the system. If there’s a human in the loop, you can do that.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. Yeah, I guess we probably should have talked about this at the outset of the conversation, that driverless is a spectrum. It’s kind of like when we talk about AI as a spectrum. I mean, there are cars that have the capacity to not have a driver and those exist, but it’s also like the Tesla that has an automated function, correct?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Right.

Lauren Lavin:

That there is a driver in the car and sitting in the seat, but you don’t have to be functioning, like you’re not holding the steering wheel.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

You have to touch the steering wheel every so often. I’m not sure what that time interval is.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

But there are actually five levels of automation in driving.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay, great.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Yeah. So zero being nothing and one being 100% human driven, no pun intended, and then the next level up is something like cruise control or small levels of automation. And it continues to grow until you get to level five, which is fully autonomous, right? There doesn’t need to be a driver behind the car.

Lauren Lavin:

Yep, So there’s a spectrum.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Lauren Lavin:

[inaudible 00:28:27] somewhere along that with all of these.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay. So yeah, now we’re moving on to the policy conversation. So based on all of this research that you’ve done, which is clearly an extensive body, what recommendations would you make to policymakers as they’re starting to consider some of these driverless vehicles and making policy for roadways regarding the integration of driverless cars into cities and safety recommendations?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Yeah. Well, like I said before, I think when we’re making policy and considering these systems, we need to be mindful of the most vulnerable people that are among us. And if we base our policy on that, we’ll keep everyone else safe as well. So making sure that we’re creating systems that are safe for children will keep everyone safe. I think in terms of what we saw for when the communication should come on, signals from driverless cars indicating that they intend to yield should not come on early. They should come on after the car has come to a complete stop so that there is no ambiguity about whether or not the car will stop and stay stopped for you.

Because like I mentioned, it can be really problematic if the light comes on early to indicate, “Hey, I’m going to stop for you. You can go ahead and cross now,” and then there’s a malfunction or something else happens on the roadway that does require the car to move forward. Because remember, roadways are complex and these systems are going to have to make decisions about other things that are happening on the roadway that aren’t just the pedestrian. And so those systems should really come on when the driver comes to a stop, and I just think that will lead to the safest behavior for children especially, but hopefully among all of us.

Lauren Lavin:

Absolutely. I always like to have some actionable tips, especially as we get to the end of these conversations. What actionable tips or key messages would you like to convey to our listeners regarding some of the future of pedestrian safety and driverless cars, or what tips would you have for teaching kids about road safety in general as we kind of walk away from this conversation?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of a big question. But I think just remembering that being aware of everything that’s happening on the roadway is important. Even though we’ll have these systems that can help us, we can’t rely on them entirely. And so reiterating that message to adults, but also making sure that we’re teaching children these lessons as well, I think, is going to be really important. Something that is really interesting about the way that children make crossing decisions is they don’t seem to make their decision early. So tailoring the communication to that, I think, is really important. I mean, we’ve done work where parents use this strategy with kids that we call prospective gap communication. So if parents are like, “Let’s go after that next car, after the red car,” we see improved movement timing among kids. So I think making sure that when parents are teaching kids to cross roads safely, they integrate messages about making decisions early, which allows you to make your actions more tightly timed with traffic, which just gives you more time to crossroads. I think that’s really important.

But I think, too, making sure that we’re talking to kids about crossing roads in a way that goes beyond, “Look right, look left. Is it okay to cross?” It’s so much more complex than that. And I think even in teen driving, there’s these talk-aloud protocols. Parents can be doing more of that with their kids. “I’m looking left. There’s a car coming, but there’s some space after it. Now I’m going to look right and see if it’s clear over there. Yep, it is. Okay. So once this car passes, I can go.”

Lauren Lavin:

That’s great advice. Rather than just the right left, showing what your process is would be so much more effective and not necessarily more work because you’re just verbalizing what you’re already doing and that helps them …

Elizabeth O’Neal:

It does feel a little silly, but yeah, I think it is helpful.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. It just helps them realize, “Oh, here’s the process that they’re using to do it.” Yeah. That is great advice. Okay. I think I have one more question. How could our audience stay informed about ongoing research and developments in this field, especially as we start to see, again, more driverless vehicles on the road and developments in this area?

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Well, I think one way that you can do it, and I am sure a lot of your listening audiences is getting emails from the College of Public Health that sort of detail a lot of the work that’s happening here at the university, the Injury Prevention Research Center here on campus has a blog that will detail a lot of the work not only that’s happening here, but issues that are relevant more broadly. I think checking out work that NSTSA, the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration, is doing. The USDOT is a good way to do it. There’s a lot of information out there, but I think seeing what you have close to home is going to be a good first step in staying informed. And always, always, always feel free to reach out to professors, if you have that as a resource, and other people in the field. If you see a name and they’re doing work that you’re interested in and want to know more about, reach out to that person. They would be really excited to share it with you.

Lauren Lavin:

That is great advice. Well, I really appreciate you taking your time today to chat with us about it. This was super informative. I loved learning about it and I’m sure our listeners did too, so I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Thank you, Lauren. I really enjoyed it. I think I told you before we started that this was my first podcast, and so it was a really good experience. I appreciate you having us on.

Lauren Lavin:

Well, you did great. None of us could tell that it was your first one, so hopefully there are more to come.

Elizabeth O’Neal:

Yes. Thank you, Lauren.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s it for our episode this week. Big thank you to Dr. O’Neal for joining us today. This episode was hosted and written by Lauren Lavin and edited and produced by Lauren Lavin. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode is brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.

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