Obstructive sleep apnoea and daytime driver sleepiness

Driver sleepiness is known to be a major contributor to road traffic incidents (RTIs). An initial literature review identified many studies reporting untreated obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) sufferers as having impaired driving performance and increased RTI risk. It is consistently reported that treatment with continuous positive air pressure (CPAP) improves driving performance and decreases RTI risk, although most of these studies are conducted less than one year after starting treatment. UK law allows treated OSA patients to continue driving if their doctor states that treatment has been successful. Despite the wealth of publications surrounding OSA and driving, 6 key areas were identified from the literature review as not fully investigated, the: (i) prevalence of undiagnosed OSA in heavy goods vehicle (HGV) drivers in the UK; (ii) impact of sleep restriction on long term CPAP treated OSA compared with healthy controls; (iii) ability of treated OSA participants to identify sleepiness when driving; (iv) impact of one night CPAP withdrawal on driving performance; (v) individual difference in driving performance of long term CPAP treated OSA participants; (vi) choice of countermeasures to driver sleepiness by two groups susceptible to driver sleepiness, OSA and HGV drivers. Key areas (i) and (vi) were assessed using questionnaires. 148 HGV drivers were surveyed to assess OSA symptoms and preference of countermeasures to driver sleepiness. All participants completing the driving simulator study were also surveyed. 9.5% of HGV drivers were found to have symptoms of suspected undiagnosed OSA. Additionally the OSA risk factors were more prevalent for HGV drivers than reported in national statistics reports for the general population. The most effective countermeasures to driver sleepiness (caffeine and a nap) were not the most popular. Being part of a susceptible group (OSA or HGV driver) and prior experience of driver sleepiness did not promote effective choice of countermeasure. Key areas (ii) to (v) were assessed using a driving simulator. Driving simulators present a safe environment to test participants in a scenario where they may experience sleepiness without endangering other road users. (Continues...)

Driver sleepiness on YouTube: A content analysis

Driver sleepiness is a major contributor to severe crashes and fatalities on our roads. Many people continue to drive despite being aware of feeling tired. Prevention relies heavily on education campaigns as it is difficult to police driver sleepiness. The video sharing social media site YouTube is extremely popular, particularly with at risk driver demographics. Content and popularity of uploaded videos can provide insight into the quality of publicly accessible driver sleepiness information. The purpose of this research was to answer two questions; firstly, how prevalent are driver sleepiness videos on YouTube? And secondly, what are the general characteristics of driver sleepiness videos in terms of (a) outlook on driver sleepiness, (b) tone, (c) countermeasures to driver sleepiness, and, (d) driver demographics.Using a keywords search, 442 relevant videos were found from a five year period (2nd December 2009-2nd December 2014). Tone, outlook, and countermeasure use were thematically coded. Driver demographic and video popularity data also were recorded. The majority of videos portrayed driver sleepiness as dangerous. However, videos that had an outlook towards driver sleepiness being amusing were viewed more often and had more mean per video comments and likes. Humorous videos regardless of outlook, were most popular. Most information regarding countermeasures to deal with driver sleepiness was accurate. Worryingly, 39.8% of videos with countermeasure information contained some kind of ineffective countermeasure. The use of humour to convey messages about the dangers of driver sleepiness may be a useful approach in educational interventions

Sleep loss and change detection in driving scenes

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. Driver sleepiness is a significant road safety problem. Sleep-related crashes occur on both urban and rural roads, yet to date driver-sleepiness research has focused on understanding impairment in rural and motorway driving. The ability to detect changes is an attention and awareness skill vital for everyday safe driving. Previous research has demonstrated that person states, such as age or motivation, influence susceptibility to change blindness (i.e., failure or delay in detecting changes). The current work considers whether sleepiness increases the likelihood of change blindness within urban and rural driving contexts. Twenty fully-licenced drivers completed a change detection 'flicker' task twice in a counterbalanced design: once following a normal night of sleep (7-8 h) and once following sleep restriction (5 h). Change detection accuracy and response time were recorded while eye movements were continuously tracked. Accuracy was not significantly affected by sleep loss; however, following sleep loss there was some evidence of slowed change detection responses to urban images, but faster responses for rural images. Visual scanning across the images remained consistent between sleep conditions, resulting in no difference in the probability of fixating on the change target. Overall, the results suggest that sleep loss has minimal impact on change detection accuracy and visual scanning for changes in driving scenes. However, a subtle difference in response time to change detection between urban and rural images indicates that change blindness may have implications for sleep-related crashes in more visually complex urban environments. Further research is needed to confirm this finding

Longitudinal change in sleep and daytime sleepiness in postpartum women

Sleep disruption strongly influences daytime functioning; resultant sleepiness is recognised as a contributing risk-factor for individuals performing critical and dangerous tasks. While the relationship between sleep and sleepiness has been heavily investigated in the vulnerable sub-populations of shift workers and patients with sleep disorders, postpartum women have been comparatively overlooked. Thirty-three healthy, postpartum women recorded every episode of sleep and wake each day during postpartum weeks 6, 12 and 18. Although repeated measures analysis revealed there was no significant difference in the amount of nocturnal sleep and frequency of night-time wakings, there was a significant reduction in sleep disruption, due to fewer minutes of wake after sleep onset. Subjective sleepiness was measured each day using the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale; at the two earlier time points this was significantly correlated with sleep quality but not to sleep quantity. Epworth Sleepiness Scores significantly reduced over time; however, during week 18 over 50% of participants were still experiencing excessive daytime sleepiness (Epworth Sleepiness Score ≥12). Results have implications for health care providers and policy makers. Health care providers designing interventions to address sleepiness in new mothers should take into account the dynamic changes to sleep and sleepiness during this initial postpartum period. Policy makers developing regulations for parental leave entitlements should take into consideration the high prevalence of excessive daytime sleepiness experienced by new mothers, ensuring enough opportunity for daytime sleepiness to diminish to a manageable level prior to reengagement in the workforce

Project report - months 1 - 18, Deliverable 1.2 of the H2020 project SafetyCube.

This report, D1.2 Project Report - months 1 – 18, provides an overview of the work undertaken in the SafetyCube project. At the time of the preparation of the project the reporting requirements were not known and an internal mid-term evaluation of the project was considered to be helpful to the project team. Since then the formal project reporting requirements have become known and the internal mid-term evaluation of the project has been superseded by the Mid-term Project Review which covers M1 – M18. The objectives for the first 18 months of the project were to: 1. Implement the project management framework to support communication between partners and achievement of project objectives. 2. Establish a project dissemination and consultation platform to ensure all stakeholders can remain informed of the project progress and can contribute to the DSS. 3. Develop the methodological framework of the DSS, and process for extracting data on risks and measures. 4. Estimate the numbers of seriously injured traffic casualties in Europe and the resulting health impacts. 5. Define the functionality of the DSS and prepare the underlying structure. Very good progress has been made in the first 18 months of the project and all objectives have been achieved. Notably; 1. The project now has a very effective management framework that is focussed on: • The project coordinator and a dedicated project administrator. • Monthly Work Package (WP) Leaders meetings for routine decision making. • Regular WP partner meetings. • Periodic full partner plenary meetings. • A dedicated web conferencing system to facilitate communication together with a central web-based document repository. 2. A dissemination platform has been established to facilitate communication between the project and future DSS users. • The project website (www.safetycube-project.eu) provides information about the project and news of recent developments. • A newsletter, published typically four times each year, provides more detailed information to recipients. • A series of stakeholder consultation workshops have provided the project team with very useful guidance regarding the functionality and content of the DSS. 3. The methodological framework for the DSS has been established and data on risks has been evaluated and recorded for entry to the DSS. • The procedure to be used to record details of risks and measures from studies has been defined. • A sophisticated data entry template has been developed to provide a consistent means to gather data for entry onto the database and to enable an automatic quality check of template use. • A total of 600 studies have been reviewed and data of 3,500 risks has been entered onto the templates. The studies cover road user, infrastructure and vehicle risks. • A total of 60 topic syntheses have been prepared to provide summaries and critical evaluation of the existing knowledge about road safety risks. The studies cover road user, infrastructure and vehicle risks. 4. Important advances have been made regarding the enumeration of serious injuries and the societal level impact. • With the assistance of EC DG-MOVE a strong collaboration has been established with the EU CARE experts group representing the Member States. • The methods used across the EU to estimate the numbers of seriously injured casualties have been reviewed and the comparability assessed. • Recommendations for approaches to improve accuracy of serious injury counting have been made. 5. The structure and functionality of the DSS has been developed and a provisional “look and feel” prepared. • A comprehensive taxonomy of risks and measures has been prepared to provide the internal structure of the DSS. • The basic functionality of the DSS has been specified and entry points, search methodologies and output descriptions have been prepared. • Wireframe screens have been prepared to illustrate the possible appearance of the DSS

Collaboration with other H2020 projects, Deliverable 1.1 of the H2020 project SafetyCube.

SafetyCube was one of five projects to be funded under the H2020 Topic MG‐3.4‐2014 Traffic Safety Analysis and Integrated Approach towards the Safety of Vulnerable Road Users. The five projects were invited by the European Commission to explore the possibilities to cooperate in technical and dissemination aspects. Early collaborations have been established between SafetyCube and other projects supported under the H2020 Topic MG‐3.4‐2014 Traffic Safety Analysis and Integrated Approach towards the Safety of Vulnerable Road Users. A series of joint activities have been conducted including: Project Coordinator collaboration meeting Joint Session at Transport Research Arena Conference, Warsaw April 2016 Informal joint project meeting at TRA Specific Joint Work Package meetings with InDeV in relation to the estimation of accident costs Future joint activities are planned to further explore collaboration opportunities between SafetyCube and other projects Invitation to other project representatives to attend SafetyCube Mid‐term workshop A joint session at the International Cycle Safety Conference in Bologna, November 2016 Further Work Package level discussions to explore potential cooperation in estimating the under‐reporting of crashes

Simulators, driver education and disadvantaged groups: A scoping review

This paper examines simulators to deliver driver education programs for two very different populations (a) those who have specific impairments or intellectual disabilities and (b) those who may suffer disadvantage associated with their ethnicity. To do this we addressed two research questions (a) What role, if any, can simulation play as an education and/or training intervention for individuals disadvantaged because of individually-orientated concerns such as intellectual impairment or ADHD? (b) What role, if any, can simulation play as an education and/or training intervention for those who are disadvantaged because of their indigenous ethnicity? Technological developments have enabled the incorporation of driving simulators into driver education programs. A review of major databases using keywords identified 2,420 records. After duplicates were removed and screening occurred, thirteen studies were included in the review. The disadvantaged populations for the driver education initiatives that incorporated a simulator were very specific (e.g. intellectual disabilities) with no interventions for those disadvantaged because of ethnicity. A second search identified six papers that discussed interventions for indigenous populations. None of these interventions had a simulator component. The review highlights the need for high quality empirical research in the area of simulators, driver education and disadvantaged groups in order to inform policy development within this area. While there are some preliminary results indicating potential benefits, there is limited research evidence for an initiative of this type making it difficult to develop evidence based policy and practice. Therefore, when these types of initiatives are introduced, they need to be evaluated</p

Augmented reality displays for communicating uncertainty information in automated driving

Safe manual driving performance following takeovers in conditionally automated driving systems is impeded by a lack in situation awareness, partly due to an inappropriate trust in the system’s capabilities. Previous work has indicated that the communication of system uncertainties can aid the trust calibration process. However, it has yet to be investigated how the information is best conveyed to the human operator. The study outlined in this publication presents an interface layout to visualise function-specific uncertainty information in an augmented reality display and explores the suitability of 11 visual variables. 46 participants completed a sorting task and indicated their preference for each of these variables. The results demonstrate that particularly colour-based and animation-based variables, above all hue, convey a clear order in terms of urgency and are well-received by participants. The presented findings have implications for all augmented reality displays that are intended to show content varying in urgency

Fatal and serious pedal cycle and truck collisions in the UK: A systems approach

Collisions between cyclists and trucks are a concerning contributor to road traffic crash fatalities within the UK. This paper applied a systems approach using the accimap method of analysis to probe deeper into contributory factors involved in cyclist/truck crashes occurring in London. In a single example case study of a cyclist/truck collision it is apparent that high level systems factors such as road design and vehicle regulations play a contributory role in such crashes. Considering the physical process and actor activates from 27 crashes it is apparent that decisions made by both the cyclist and truck driver have individual and interacting effects on crash causation. Overall, accimaps appear to be an appropriate method for considering the contributory factors of cyclist/truck collisions, however, it is acknowledged that the robustness of findings is limited by the scope of information included in the original incident reports

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. The uncertainty information was conveyed visually using a stylised heart beat combined with a numerical display and users were engaged in a visual search task. Multilevel analysis results suggest that uncertainty communication helps operators calibrate their trust and gain situation awareness prior to critical situations, resulting in safer takeovers. Additionally, eye tracking data indicate that operators can adjust their gaze behaviour in correspondence with the level of uncertainty. However, conveying uncertainties using a visual display significantly increases operator workload and impedes users in the execution of non-driving related tasks