Fatigue Management
The hazards and business risks associated with worker fatigue are significant. Fatigue impairs alertness (or drowsiness), often without the worker's awareness. Traditionally, fatigue or alertness levels in workers have not been easily measured or quantified. This has created serious hurdles for risk managers as administrative solutions alone have severe limitations. In essence, it's very difficult to manage what you cannot objectively measure.
Tackling overall worker fatigue is very similar to other impairments. To truly eliminate or mitigate the hazards and business risks associated with fatigue, a company needs to have a comprehensive strategy that includes leadership & commitment, education & training, objective measurements, as well as accommodation & support. A comprehensive fatigue management strategy will be suited to the risks and risk thresholds of an individual company and incorporate all of these elements to varying degrees.
Drowsiness versus Fatigue
Drowsiness must be distinguished from fatigue. Some people think they are the same and use the word fatigue to mean drowsiness. This is misleading. Drowsiness is defined as the intermediate state between alert wakefulness and sleep. It is an unstable state, which fluctuates between different levels. Drowsiness intermittently causes lack of awareness of the here-and-now; that is why it is so dangerous for drivers/operators.
By contrast, fatigue is defined as a behavioural state associated with feelings of weariness and discomfort, muscle aches, and a disinclination to continue the task at hand. Fatigue gets progressively worse with the duration and intensity of the task. You don't have to be fatigued to become drowsy, but you can be both fatigued and drowsy at the same time. Fatigue doesn't fluctuate rapidly, over periods of a few seconds, as drowsiness does. Rest and inactivity relieves fatigue, but this makes drowsiness worse.
Enter OPTALERT
Objectively Measuring Alertness or Drowsiness
We can now continuously and objective measure alertness. The JDS (John's Drowsiness Scale) provides a base-line scale for all individuals similar to a BAC measurement (blood alcohol concentration). The JDS allows for an objective measurement of the individual's current physiological state of alertness - irrelevant of how the individual got to the current state, or the actual individual (male/female, large/small, ethnicity, age, etc.). It simply indicates the individual's measurement on the scale.
The risk profile correlates to the measurement. As with BAC, as an individual's blood alcohol level increases, their risk or likelihood of having an incident increases. As the level of drowsiness increases, the risk or likelihood of having an incident increases. This is the importance of an objective measurement - a BAC or JDS score. Individual drivers or operators at .08 BAC may not have an incident, but the likelihood is much higher. The same is true for a JDS score. The ability to have that measurement allows for the mitigation of the risk or likelihood of an incident.
OPTALERT's technology presents employers, for the very first time, the ability to actively measure an operator's level of alertness continuously and objectively. The ability to measure and record an operator's physiological state of alertness is unprecedented in managing workplace fatigue. It not only facilitates proactive mitigation activities with visual & audible alerts at the onset of drowsiness, but also provides crucial monitoring input used in both post-incident root cause analysis and optimizing tailored corporate fatigue management policies.
As risk managers, it presents us with proactive & monitoring data that we have never had to mitigate drowsiness and ultimately build better policy.
OPTALERT allows companies to:
Proactively:
- Give driver/operators a true & objective measurement of their current state of alertness, allowing them to actively manage their alertness frontline, and thus actively manage the risk;
- The ability to "real-time" medium & high-risk situations to individuals or control centres who can actively work with operators to mitigate the risks.
Monitoring Data:
- With measurements being recorded, post incident root-cause analysis can better address alertness as a contributing factor to incidents, as alertness measurements can be looked at leading up to and at the time of incidents;
- The ability to look at individual worker, vehicle and specific operational alertness data, base-line data and analysis can be conducted to develop better policy - specific to each company.