Smart Shirts Measure Workers’ Attention Spans

A University of Waterloo (UW) research team will use “smart shirts” to study the attention spans of people doing everyday tasks and suggest ways to improve safety standards.

Daniel Smilek, a UW professor of psychology, will use the LifeShirt System from VivoMetrics, of Ventura, California, to conduct a new study on human visual attention. The project, entitled “A Port­able Laboratory for Studying Human Attention in the Real World,” recently received a $78,927 grant from the Ontario Research Fund, matching an earlier grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.