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How To Prevent Falling Asleep When Driving

6th July, 2011 - Posted by health news - No Comments

The Fourth of July, Labor Day and Memorial Day are getting closer and closer. The news, however, doesn’t agree with the word “fun” since it’s always delivered with death tolls, and only about highway accidents. The driver’s fatigue, caused by long hours of driving, lack of sleep, and demanding holiday needs, plays a part in the increased accident rates, especially during the over-busy three day weekends.

The only possible solution to this is to have a refreshing rest, or enough sleep. However, it’s human nature to push oneself to the limit. And this is clearly the case for most drivers behind the wheel. Very soon this can qualify to an addition to the national sleep deficit, which is quite expected due to America’s 24 hour, work hard, play hard culture. The fatigue levels can be detected using Biomechanics, and thus the driver can be awakened using an alarm. Although this method is not foolproof, it is clearly a breakthrough. To keep learning about online education be sure to check out Cert 4 in OHS.

The one thing for certain is that the fatigue caused by driving for long hours is one of the leading threats on the roads. Considering that the numbers from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration were near to accurate, about 100,000 crashes, 71,000 injuries, and 1,500 casualties are reported yearly. Additionally, vehicular crashes and accidents on the road account for up to $12.5 billion in property loss. According to some people, the driver fatigue really has a significant role in about one million crashes yearly, asserting that these crashes are attributed to driver inattention.

According to a trusted authority in the field of eye blinks and driver fatigue, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St.Louis and MO, people shouldn’t drive, obviously, with their eyes closed. But then they are already susceptible to accidents, he said, long before you fall asleep behind the wheel. With high hopes of devising a gadget that could detect the signs of driver fatigue in a driver, he and other experts have studied the physiological characteristics of sleep for over a decade. Most of their research efforts were concentrated on the trucking industry, since the operators are usually at the greatest risks. As the gadgets become more readily available in the market for passenger cars, he expects that the price will drop, even though, right now, one unit costs up to several thousand dollars.

What measures of the fatigue are these devices most likely to monitor? Scientists contend that long blinks and eye closures occur too late in the behavioral chain to be useful as predictors of impaired performance because a driver with closed eyes may already be in the danger zone. Alarm systems are also focused on the later stages of sleep, since drivers are likely to lapse into sleep and lose all alertness level completely. At Cert 4 in OHS you’ll find more expert resources on online education.

It is important that the gadget can detect the earlier symptoms of fatigue, so that it can make corrective actions quickly. To detect short and unexpected mental lapses, the gadget must be able to detect the various irregularities in eye movements. These abnormalities lead straight to the transition to sleep. The affectivity of the gadgets will ultimately increase if they are able to detect and identify these mental lapses.