Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/904267
November 2017 | Overdrive | 27 for 30 minutes. It comes down to the abil- ity to measure the human body to better understand and determine what is safe." He believes such a system will "allow these guys to have much better" health outcomes and quality of life than exists today, given the close relationships between fatigue, stress and health. What might work best, Osterberg says, is using combined technologies. One layer, he says, could be psychomo- tor vigilance task tests developed by NASA, where answering test questions determines an individual's performance level. PVTs also have been used in driver fatigue research. In Osterberg's example, a PVT test could be combined with use of a wrist- watch-like actigraph that, by measuring body movement, assesses sleep volume and quality. "We could get a pretty refined sense of what the driver's capable of doing in a given day," he says, adding that video monitoring and facial mapping also could be used. There are other fatigue monitoring technologies, too. One wearable device measures brain waves, and another mea- sures head movements as indicators of mirror checks, micro-sleeps and distrac- tion. Some wearables capture heart and respiration rates, which can be fatigue indicators. Another system is baked into Blue Tree Systems's electronic logging device/ telematics platform. It can measure the time between lifting off the accelerator As many truckers are quick to point out, the hours of service rule's one-size-fi ts- all prescription isn't suited for driv- ers' highly variable and unpredictable schedules. The fi xed 14-hour on-duty clock virtu- ally forces truckers to continue to oper- ate when they feel tired and otherwise would opt for a long break. "The government really screwed up when they took away the ability to take a nap … and not lose that time" in the duty day, says small-fl eet owner Harold Hoff- man, echoing common driver sentiment. Given the predominance of per-mile pay, drivers are pressured to pack as many on-duty hours into that 14-hour window as possible, leaving no room for rest beyond the required 30-minute break. The rule offers little to no fl ex- ibility for managing rest during their off-duty periods. Don Osterberg, a former member of FMCSA's Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee, notes that the rule often pushes a driver away from an anchor sleep period and into a drifting sleep pattern. "The anchor sleep period provides the most restorative value to mitigate both short- and long-term fatigue," he says. A driver might sleep from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. one week but has to start the next week with a pattern of nighttime driving and daytime sleep. "Our bodies can't adapt to those wide swings in work-rest patterns," he says. Though FMCSA insists the regula- tions are based on the best available research, drivers consider them at best arbitrary limits imposed by those who do not do the work in trucking. HOURS OF DISSERVICE Fatigue Science offers one of the systems that, based on a variety of data, predicts when each driver will reach a dangerous level of fatigue. It's up to the fleet how to work with this information. WHAT BEST DESCRIBES HOW YOU'D FEEL ABOUT AN HOURS OF SERVICE RULE THAT RESTRICTS/EXPANDS AVAILABLE HOURS BASED IN PART ON FATIGUE MONITORING TECH? Don't favor Any fatigue monitoring is too much of a privacy intrusion for my comfort 26% If it involves driver-facing cameras, it would be too much of a privacy intrusion 26% In favor of exploration… The current rule doesn't keep fatigued drivers off the road 12% Only if the tech is proven and applicable to all drivers in a consistent way 8% If it's guaranteed not to reduce my income 2% Unsure, too many unknowns 14% It won't happen There are too many legal barriers for govt. to reach so far into driver's health 12% Based on October polling at OverdriveOnline.com, most readers do not favor exploration of a tech- nological approach to the hours of service rule based on fatigue monitoring, most citing unwanted privacy intrusions. One in 10 believed such an approach to hours could never get over legal barriers related to medical privacy.