Publications by authors named "A J Filtness"

Sleepiness is a significant workplace safety hazard and prevalent in shift workers including bus drivers. Several aspects of professional driving can result in shortened sleep and increased sleepiness, which has the potential to result in workplace injuries, incidents and crashes. Caffeine is an effective sleepiness countermeasure; however, private and professional drivers also report using potentially ineffective countermeasures such as sugar.

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This paper presents a new conceptual framework, and stepwise approach to populate it, for informing countermeasure development to support fitness-to-drive for professional drivers. Professional drivers are vital to the transport network; however, the job is demanding and drivers are vulnerable to impairments which may impact safe driving. Countermeasures are any action or activity that mitigates the impact or frequency of occurrence of driver impairment.

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Article Synopsis
  • Many bus drivers feel sleepy while driving, but they often don't talk about it.
  • A study looked at real bus drivers on their usual routes to find out how sleep and stress affected them.
  • It showed that drivers usually don't get enough sleep before early morning shifts, and both sleepiness and stress can happen during both early morning and daytime shifts for different reasons.
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Effective evidence-based policy making within road safety is a several step cyclic process that involves gathering data about the causes of crashes, analysing these data, developing countermeasures and implementing and evaluating them. There are many examples of crash causation focused data collection activities available to policy makers but knowledge on how these finding may have led to countermeasure implementation and new policy is much less well established. This paper proposes a framework for best practice evidence-based policy making.

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Skin wetness sensing is important for thermal stress resilience. Individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) present greater vulnerability to thermal stress; yet, it is unclear whether they present wetness-sensing abnormalities. We investigated the effects of MS on wetness sensing and their modulation with changes in mean skin temperature (T).

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