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Paul explained his role and involvement with regards to the seminar, what he is looking forward to at the event and why it is important for engineers and other industry professionals to attend.
Q: Could you briefly explain your role, involvement and experience with regards to this seminar?
Paul Jackson (PJ): I am a Chartered Psychologist who, for the past 20 years has helped safety-critical organisations to manage the fatigue and alertness of their workforce. I have worked with clients from aviation, oil and gas, mining, rail and road transport.
Q: What are the main challenges encountered when trying to deal with the inherent risks associated with driver and pilot alertness?
PJ: For me, one of the main challenges is the balance between individual responsibility to manage alertness by obtaining sufficient quality sleep and the operational demands that are often imposed on a workforce, which may impact on the individual’s ability to meet this responsibility.
Q: What key topics are you excited to speak about?
PJ: Discussions of alertness tend to focus on prior sleep quality and quantity, length of wakefulness and circadian disruption. Whilst these are all clearly of major importance, I am keen to extend the discussion to include other factors that typically receive less attention, but which may also have a significant impact on driver and pilot alertness.
Q: Who else are you most interested in hearing from on the programme, and why?
PJ: I am interested to hear more about Dr Katja Kircher’s work on the theory of Minimum Required Attention, as well as hearing from Robert Sumwalt on how the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is addressing the challenges associated with the alertness of vehicle operators.
Q: Why is it important for engineers and other professionals to join this seminar?
PJ: Having a good understanding of the impact of reduced alertness on the ability to safely control a vehicle and the range of factors that can contribute to reduced alertness is fundamental to developing in-vehicle interventions that will have a positive impact on safety.
Q: What developments are you most interested in for the future and why?
PJ: I am interested to see how driver/pilot Drowsiness and Alertness Monitoring devices develop in the future. Much of the work in this area has focused on identifying fatigue/reduced attention when it is at its most severe (e.g. microsleeps). For these devices and systems to be of most value it is necessary to identify an operator exhibiting reduced alertness before it reaches this level of impairment.
Q: What lessons are there to be learned between other modes of transport or other operations when trying to mitigate the inherent risks?
PJ: A key issue for me is operator acceptance of new technology designed to monitor alertness. The introduction of driver monitoring equipment, for example, is often viewed with intense suspicion by vehicle operators. We can all learn from the experience of those organisations that have introduced systems – what methods did they use to engage the workforce, what worked and what steps should be taken to prepare the organisation to be ready and accepting of the new technology?
The Driver and Pilot Alertness seminar will take place on 5 December 2019 at One Birdcage Walk in London. Join this event to:
- Gain insight into new approaches and technologies that can be used to understand, control and prevent accidents across the transport industry
- Stay up to date with the latest standards and regulation for ensuring driver and pilot alertness
- Learn best practice in designing human-machine interfaces in autonomous vehicles from the automotive sector
- Share ideas with your peers about how to best integrate human factors into the design process through our interactive panel discussion
- Network with human factors specialists, designers and engineers from the aerospace, railway and automotive industries
To book your place, please visit www.imeche.org/humanfactors.