(21c) Education, Planning, and Design: Three Key Aspects of a Fatigue Risk Management System

Fatigue for the average person can cause problems that range from oversleeping and missing an important meeting to dangerously falling asleep at the wheel. In safety critical environments, worker fatigue can lead to catastrophic consequences when warnings are overlooked or wrong decisions are made. Fatigue is not easy to define, nor measure, but includes a lack of alertness and reduced mental and physical performance. Because fatigue’s causes and cures are not tied exclusively to an individual’s job, it is important for management to have preventative measures in place that extend to outside of work hours.   Implementing a Fatigue Risk Management System can help reduce worker fatigue and improve situation awareness, especially during shifts where risk of fatigue is high.

 A Fatigue Risk Management System should include three fatigue mitigating focus areas: Sleep Hygiene Education for Workers, On Duty Alertness Strategies, and Designing Controls and Displays for Situation Awareness. Understanding the human body and how environmental factors can affect sleep are important to helping workers achieve and maintain good sleep hygiene. Management’s employment of fatigue alertness strategies, especially during night shifts, is crucial to helping employees be alert and focused during high workload tasks. Currently, there is much focus on alarm management and how to display and acknowledge alarms, but a fatigued worker’s perception prior to an alarm state should be considered for the entire user interface. Designing controls and displays that use human factors principles to bring notice to safety critical information is essential in helping fatigued workers recognize potential system problems. Combining these three focus areas of education, strategic planning, and display design, the risk of fatigue can be managed in safety critical environments.