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This review identifies individual factors linked to adaptability under ICE conditions. Further studies are needed to verify causal directions and determine the relative importance of these factors.Bartone PT, Krueger GP, Bartone JV. Individual differences in adaptability to isolated, confined, and extreme environments. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2018; 89(6):536-546.

This article summarizes the recommendations on data and methodology issues for studying commercial motor vehicle driver fatigue of a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study. A framework is provided that identifies the various factors affecting driver fatigue and relating driver fatigue to crash risk and long-term driver health. The relevant factors include characteristics of the driver, vehicle, carrier and environment. Limitations of existing data are considered and potential sources of additional data described. Statistical methods that can be used to improve understanding of the relevant relationships from observational data are also described. The recommendations for enhanced data collection and the use of modern statistical methods for causal inference have the potential to enhance our understanding of the relationship of fatigue to highway safety and to long-term driver health.

This study involved over-the-road testing of four fatigue management technologies (FMTs) in trucking operations in Canada and the United States. Technologies bundled into a single intervention came from four fatigue management domains: one providing objective information on driver sleep need, one providing objective information on driver drowsiness, one providing objective information on lane tracking performance, and one reducing the work involved in controlling vehicle stability while driving. The objective was to determine driver reactions to such technologies and whether FMT feedback would improve alertness, especially during night driving, or increase sleep time on workdays or nonworkdays. A within-subjects crossover design was used to compare the effects of FMT feedback to no feedback. Each driver underwent the conditions in the same order: 2 weeks of no feedback (control) followed by 2 weeks of FMT feedback (intervention). Data from the devices and other driving performance variables were recorded every second of truck operation for 28 days for each driver, with a resulting 8.7 million data records among the 38 drivers. Support was found for FMT effects. During night driving, FMT feedback significantly reduced driver drowsiness (p = 0.004) and lane tracking variability (p = 0.007). However, there was evidence from probed psychomotor vigilance task testing that these improvements may have had cost because of the effort (in attention and compensatory behaviors) required to respond to information from the devices. In general, participants agreed that commercial drivers would benefit from FMT and were more positive about those involving vehicle monitoring than those involving driver monitoring.

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