On a video from a flight simulator, two trained pilots face an emergency scenario. 

Dials flash. The lights go off. One pilot stays calm. The other panics before regaining control.

As the clip plays, Naila Ayala, Chief of Science at Key Metrix, explains what’s happening.

“Soon these emergency lights are going to go off, and for the next half a second to three seconds, you’ll see that there’s almost panic,” she says. “They’re not sure where they’re supposed to look, or what they’re supposed to do next.”

Ayala is a cognitive neuroscientist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo. She led a study there using simulators and eye-tracking that showed female pilots perform better than male pilots under pressure. The research was a University of Waterloo project, but it now shapes her role at Key Metrix, where she serves as Chief of Science.

Key Metrix, a Waterloo-based company founded by Jean Taylor, combines case management for people with traumatic injuries with technology that measures stress and fatigue.

“We’re getting all this data from all these different types of devices and trying to get insight into things like stress, workload and how attention changes when people are performing in these very stressful situations,” Ayala said.

The pilot study surprised her, especially since only six per cent of pilots around the world are women.

“There wasn’t too much to separate the way that males and females were actually focusing their attention in the cockpit. It was the performance differences in the end that showed differences, and female pilots outperformed male pilots in the emergency scenarios,” she said. “These traditional assumptions about gender and aviation clearly are not true and the data shows it’s much more complex than that.”

What a flight simulator tells us about everyday stress

While the study focused on aviation, the same tools can be applied elsewhere. Key Metrix is now using this framework to measure cognitive states like anxiety and fatigue in workplaces and health care.

“Imagine something where you have a reading of anxiety,” said Taylor. “Right now, the standard of science is that you give people the questionnaire and you say, between one and 10, how anxious were you? What you’re really getting is what the person has insight into or is willing to describe.”

Taylor pointed to the difference between knowing you’re stressed and being able to detect it early enough to act. 

“About 15 minutes before the individual indicated they were fatigued, Naila said to me, ‘Look, they’re fatigued.’ They could already see the early indicators of fatigue. That would be a good place if your watch could buzz so you could then take a break.”

Taylor calls this “pioneering in neuroergonomics.” The idea is to give people an early signal that lets them adjust before they hit the wall.

When stress keeps people from going back to work

Key Metrix sees applications in mental health and insurance.

“There was a trend happening before COVID, and it was the trend of mental health causing the inability to return to work,” said Taylor. “Then COVID hit and it got worse. Without a doubt, mental health has become an epidemic for life and health insurers as the main reason for not returning to work.”

Taylor pointed to insurer data from 2024. 

“If people did not get back to work from a mental health absence in 90 days, the average number of days that passed before they’d return to work was 987,” she said. “That’s over three years.”

Key Metrix believes that dynamic, real-time measures of stress and fatigue could help people come back sooner. 

“It could help determine what light duties could look like and potentially have a pathway to return to work,” Jean said.

Why Waterloo Region is the best test lab

Key Metrix has built its research and business in Waterloo Region, surrounded by post-secondary institutions, a flight school and insurance companies.

“This seemed to be the place to do this,” said Ayala. “Whatever I’m studying in the lab today is answering a very key issue or some kind of challenge that the aviation industry is facing or that the health industry is facing. For that research to actually feed directly into policy change or having some sort of product be devised and then sent out into the real world and actually create change is really extraordinary.”

Taylor believes that geography matters. 

“We’ve been able to work with insurers and this is why we have an interest in the return to work, whether it’s from an injury from a car accident or life and health. Waterloo has Sun Life, Manulife, Canada Life, and Equitable Life,” said Taylor. “We consider our product medtech but we also consider it insurtech.”

As a member of Velocity and Communitech, Key Metrix has also tapped into the local tech ecosystem for support. 

“We’re in a fundraising cycle right now and they’re really supporting us with that as well,” said Taylor.

What stress data means for the rest of us

For Key Metrix, the path forward is to keep applying stress science to real-world settings. The research shows that assumptions about performance can be wrong, whether in the cockpit or the workplace.

“We’re not just relying on heart rate monitors. We’re not just relying on questionnaires,” said Ayala. “We’re trying to get this very comprehensive data collection process that can give us insight as in-depth as possible to ensure that we’re not missing key indicators.”