An overview of sleepiness and accidents

TLDR

The 24‑hour work culture and automation increase fatigue‑related accident risks as more people perform vigilance tasks outside traditional daytime hours. The paper reviews the link between neurobiological sleepiness/fatigue and human‑error accidents, calls for sustained fatigue‑management priorities, and urges urgent data on key failure areas and countermeasure effectiveness. The authors conduct a literature review of neurobiological sleepiness/fatigue and its association with human‑error accidents. The review concludes that fatigue drives human error and accidents, imposing human, environmental, and economic costs in technology‑rich societies.

Abstract

This paper reviews the association between neurobiologically-based sleepiness/fatigue and human-error related accidents. It concludes that fatigue contributes to human error and accidents in technology-rich, industrialized societies in terms of human, environmental and economic impacts. The cultural utilization of time as expressed in 24-h work operations, combined with the widespread use of automation, will continue to escalate in the next century, further increasing the risks of fatigue-related accidents, as more people conduct vigilance-based activities at times other than the traditional daytime work hours. Fatigue management and prevention of fatigue-related catastrophes need to become a sustained priority for government, industries, labour, and the public. Scientific data are urgently needed on the most likely areas in which sleepiness-related performance failures contribute to accidents, and on the effectiveness of a wide range of potentially useful countermeasures.