Fatigue increases the risk of an accident if the driver, on recognizing symptoms of fatigue, does not stop driving. We studied whether a tendency to continue the current activity and complete the task especially affects younger drivers, who are more susceptible to motivational pressures at the wheel in general. The data con-sisted of Finnish in-depth studies on 586 single-vehicle and 1357 multiple-vehicle accidents in which at least one vehicle occupant died. When excluding alcohol-related cases, the results showed that, first, trailer-truck drivers who either fell asleep or were tired to a degree that contributed to the accident were younger than those involved in the other fatalities. For car drivers, the proportion of fatigue-related cases was approximately constant in each age group, but a variation was seen when studied according to the time of day of the accident, mainly resulting from two distinct peaks. The first was in young drivers 18 to 20 years old between midnight and 6:00 a.m. The other occurred in drivers 56 years and older during the late afternoon hours. These data also indicate that in terms of fatal accidents, fatigue and alcohol seem to be less of a problem for truckers than for car drivers.

Abstract: A driver-vehicle interaction model consisting of a closed loop system, developed recently, has been used to simulate the behaviour of drivers having different values of driver error and driver day dream factors. Concept of Risk Time, Driver Error and Driver Daydream Factors is presented and used to evaluate the vehicle-driver model. A process cycle of a driver-vehicle model is set up based on man-machine system theory. Crash conditions between two vehicles is presented, which can be used to design the intelligent control scheme for the highway system. When the risk time is large the normal driver is less attentive and the cycle time, defined in the driver model, becomes large. However, some drivers can have a cycle time comparable to the risk time. The value of the driver daydream factor, defined in the paper, becomes large for such drivers. The muscle response of such a driver is usually slower, giving rise to large values of the driver error in the driver model. The results for simulations of vehicle following another vehicle while changing the speed and driving under varying visibility conditions are presented. The computational results obtained have only logical and qualitative support; an exact quantitative comparison is not immediately possible.

I am very thankful to my advisor, Janet Hering, for all that she has done in helping me with this research. Her insight and her thoroughness have taught me a lot; I have learned from her how to critically assess my own scientific work and the work of others. I would also like to express my appreciation to the other members of my thesis advisory committee: Mike Hoffmann, who was supportive of me since I first arrived on campus; Jim Randerson, who agreed to be on my committee shortly after he arrived on campus; and Jim Morgan, who has generously given of his time to offer advice. I would also like to thank Professor Robert C. Graham of University of California, Riverside who was extremely helpful particularly at the beginning as I embarked on this soil mineralogy project without knowing much about soils or mineralogy. My thanks and appreciation go out to all the others who helped me with technical aspects of this project, including John Rogie at U.S.G.S, Chi Ma for help with XRD, Professor George Rossman and Ronit Kesselman for help with mineralogical analysis, Kathleen Treseder and Sasha Tsapin for their preliminary analysis of the mycorrhizal fungi and microbial populations, Carole Garland and Andrea Belz for help with TEM, Mike Vondrus for making my reaction vessels, Dianne Newman for letting us borrow her HPLC column, Peter Green, Nathan Dalleska, Yaniv Dubowksi and Bob Becker for analytical support, and Bill Balcerski for help with the IC. Thanks also to

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Fatal distraction: a case series of fatal fall-asleep road accidents and their medicolegal outcomes

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Based on Coroners ' verdicts, fatigue of car or truck drivers was a contributing factor in 9.1 % of fatal accidents involving trucks. Based on the presence of factors such as extended driving hours, falling asleep at the wheel, comments about tiredness, driving right of centre and night-time driving, the authors estimated fatigue contributed to 19.9 % of the accidents. There were approximately equal numbers of fatigued car drivers and truck drivers. An analysis of casualty and fatal truck accidents by time of day (adjusted for exposure) showed that accident risks were highest during the night on all five Victorian highways studied. Driver fatigue is one of the possible factors underlying this pattern of elevated risk. The report section described in-vehicle fatigue counter-measures. The distinction between fatigue monitors and alerting devices was made and it was recommended that eye closure and head nodding monitors and an alerting device be tested in the next stage of this project. Key Words: Fatigue (human), accident rate, fatality,

This is a review of psychophysiological evidence relevant to the problem of drowsy drivers who “fall asleep at the wheel”. Although wide-reaching, it is not an exhaustive review. It does not include biochemical and hormonal changes at sleep-onset. If focuses rather on several points of view that I believe are potentially helpful, as well as others that have been tried in the past and which I believe are not very helpful. Several conceptual and methodological problems are identified that are impeding our progress in this field. They relate particularly to the currently accepted model of sleep and wakefulness, and to the definitions of sleep stages by Rechtschafen and Kales (1968) that are quite inadequate to describe drowsiness as a fluctuating state between alert wakefulness and R&K stage-1 sleep. An understanding of the anatomy, physiology, and movements (both normal and abnormal) of the eyes and eyelids can explain their role in intentional and unintentional sleep-onset in a way that has not been described before. The concept of a microsleep, which is a brief period of stage-1 sleep with theta-waves dominating the EEG, is useful but does not explain many episodes of performance failure by

Objectives: To provide a consensus report from an expert group on options for the medium term development of regulatory approaches to the management of fatigue in drivers of heavy vehicles. Abstract: This report was commissioned jointly by the National Road Transport Commission of Australia, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and the New Zealand Land Transport Safety Authority. The fatigue expert group comprised leading Australian and New Zealand experts in sleep, shiftwork and road safety who collaborated with the participating agencies and industry representatives to construct a set of evidence-based design principles for future fatigue regulatory options. The group considered that the management of driver fatigue is not a matter for operators and

individual rest periods initiated at advancing periods into the flight.............................................10