Predicting the use of sugar and caffeine as countermeasures to sleepiness in London bus drivers.

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.

A framework for countermeasures design to support professional drivers' fitness-to-drive.

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.

Proposing a framework for evidence-based road safety policy-making: Connecting crash causation, countermeasures and policy.

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.

Regional skin wetness perception and its modulation by warm and cold whole body skin temperatures in people with multiple sclerosis.

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).

Heat and cold sensitivity in multiple sclerosis: A patient-centred perspective on triggers, symptoms, and thermal resilience practices.

Background: The negative effects of heat and cold on Multiple Sclerosis (MS) have been known for ∼100 years. Yet, we lack patient-centred investigations on temperature sensitivity in persons with MS (pwMS).

Objectives: To evaluate triggers, symptoms, and thermal resilience practices of temperature sensitivity pwMS via a dedicated survey.

Predicting the intention of distracted pedestrians at road crossings.

Despite improvements to road safety, accidents involving pedestrians are still numerous, for example in the UK there were over 20,000 pedestrian casualties on public roads in 2019. One of the potential causal factors is pedestrian distraction. Therefore, this study aimed to predict pedestrian intention to cross the road under conditions of distraction (using phone maps, talking to another pedestrian, listening to music through headphones), by applying the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) using an online survey.

A patient-centred evaluation of phantom skin wetness as a sensory symptom in people with multiple sclerosis.

Background: A noticeable but unknown proportion of people with multiple sclerosis (pwMS) report the sudden experience of wetness on a dry skin site, i.e., phantom wetness.

Autonomous Vehicles and Vulnerable Road-Users-Important Considerations and Requirements Based on Crash Data from Two Countries.

(1) Background: Passenger vehicles equipped with advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) functionalities are becoming more prevalent within vehicle fleets. However, the full effects of offering such systems, which may allow for drivers to become less than 100% engaged with the task of driving, may have detrimental impacts on other road-users, particularly vulnerable road-users, for a variety of reasons. (2) Crash data were analysed in two countries (Great Britain and Australia) to examine some challenging traffic scenarios that are prevalent in both countries and represent scenarios in which future connected and autonomous vehicles may be challenged in terms of safe manoeuvring.

Post-trip safety interventions: State-of-the-art, challenges, and practical implications.

Introduction: Currently, risky driving behaviour is a major contributor to road crashes and as a result, wide array of tools have been developed in order to record and improve driving behaviour. Within that group of tools, interventions have been indicated to significantly enhance driving behaviour and road safety. This study critically reviews monitoring technologies that provide post-trip interventions, such as retrospective visual feedback, gamification, rewards or penalties, in order to inform an appropriate driver mentoring strategy delivered after each trip.

Injury crashes and the relationship with disease causing excessive daytime sleepiness.

Objective: The objective of this study was to understand the relationship between some of the most common diseases that are known to contribute to excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) and traffic injury crashes. Specific focus was on the relationship between disease and crash type (single-vehicle or multiple-vehicle crash) and between disease and injury severity.

Methods: This registry-based study considered all passenger car drivers involved in a crash in Sweden between 2011 and 2016 who were 40 years or older at the time of the crash ( = 54,090).

Bus driver fatigue: A qualitative study of drivers in London.

The research represents one of the first major qualitative studies to subjectively investigate fatigue amongst city bus drivers. Funded by TfL (grant no. 94050), the study considers the perspectives of both the bus drivers themselves and their managers.

Going underground: Fatigue and sleepiness in tunnelling operations.

This research represents one of the first qualitative studies to investigate fatigue in the tunnelling sector of the construction industry. It explores the opinions of tunnellers and their managers about how fatigue influences or is influenced by tunnelling, and how this is managed. Fatigue and sleepiness were discussed in six focus groups with frontline workers (n = 42) and 10 manager interviews.

The impact of sleep loss on sustained and transient attention: an EEG study.

Sleep is one of our most important physiological functions that maintains physical and mental health. Two studies examined whether discrete areas of attention are equally affected by sleep loss. This was achieved using a repeated-measures within-subjects design, with two contrasting conditions: normal sleep and partial sleep restriction of 5-h.

Review and ranking of crash risk factors related to the road infrastructure.

The objective of this paper is the review and comparative assessment of infrastructure related crash risk factors, with the explicit purpose of ranking them based on how detrimental they are towards road safety (i.e. crash risk, frequency and severity).

Automation transparency: implications of uncertainty communication for human-automation interaction and interfaces.

Operators of highly automated driving systems may exhibit behaviour characteristic for overtrust issues due to an insufficient awareness of automation fallibility. Consequently, situation awareness in critical situations is reduced and safe driving performance following emergency takeovers is impeded. A driving simulator study was used to assess the impact of dynamically communicating system uncertainties on monitoring, trust, workload, takeovers, and physiological responses.

Bad behaviour or societal failure? Perceptions of the factors contributing to drivers' engagement in the fatal five driving behaviours.

The so-called 'fatal five' behaviours (drink and drug driving, distraction and inattention, speeding, fatigue, and failure to wear a seat belt) are known to be the major behavioural contributory factors to road trauma. However, little is known about the factors that lead to drivers engaging in each behaviour. This article presents the findings from a study which collected and analysed data on the factors that lead to drivers engaging in each behaviour.

The European road safety decision support system on risks and measures.

The European Road Safety Decision Support System (roadsafety-dss.eu) is an innovative system providing the available evidence on a broad range of road risks and possible countermeasures. This paper describes the scientific basis of the DSS.

Burden of injury of serious road injuries in six EU countries.

Background: Information about the burden of (non-fatal) road traffic injury is very useful to further improve road safety policy. Previous studies calculated the burden of injury in individual countries. This paper estimates and compares the burden of non-fatal serious road traffic injuries in six EU countries/regions: Austria, Belgium, England, The Netherlands, the Rhône region in France and Spain.

To stop or not to stop: Contrasting compliant and non-compliant driver behaviour at rural rail level crossings.

Many rail level crossings (RLXs) have only passive protection, such as static signs instructing road users to stop, yield, or look for trains. Stop signs have been suggested as a low-cost option to improve safety at passive RLXs, as requiring drivers to stop should encourage safe behaviour. However, field observations have noted high rates of non-compliance at stop-controlled RLXs.

Risk and safety perception on urban and rural roads: Effects of environmental features, driver age and risk sensitivity.

Objective: The ability to detect changing visual information is a vital component of safe driving. In addition to detecting changing visual information, drivers must also interpret its relevance to safety. Environmental changes considered to have high safety relevance will likely demand greater attention and more timely responses than those considered to have lower safety relevance.

Change detection in urban and rural driving scenes: Effects of target type and safety relevance on change blindness.

The ability to detect changes is crucial for safe driving. Previous research has demonstrated that drivers often experience change blindness, which refers to failed or delayed change detection. The current study explored how susceptibility to change blindness varies as a function of the driving environment, type of object changed, and safety relevance of the change.

Factors associated with self-reported driver sleepiness and incidents in city bus drivers.

Driver fatigue has received increased attention during recent years and is now considered to be a major contributor to approximately 15-30% of all crashes. However, little is known about fatigue in city bus drivers. It is hypothesized that city bus drivers suffer from sleepiness, which is due to a combination of working conditions, lack of health and reduced sleep quantity and quality.

Systems-based approach to investigate unsafe pedestrian behaviour at level crossings.

Crashes at level crossings are a major issue worldwide. In Australia, as well as in other countries, the number of crashes with vehicles has declined in the past years, while the number of crashes involving pedestrians seems to have remained unchanged. A systematic review of research related to pedestrian behaviour highlighted a number of important scientific gaps in current knowledge.