Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote user="Murphy Siding"]Earlier, you mentioned the Smart Cap would help weed out who shouldn't be operating a train due to a tendency to have sleep issues.  Now, you're changing your tune, and saying the Smart Cap should be used to wake up the engineer when he falls asleep???[/quote] <div> The SmartCap or similar smart alerter system can do both, and it will be used for both purposes. It will act like a wakeup alarm just as the current alerters do, but unlike current alerters, the smart alerter will not just give timed alarms as a wake up test in case an engineer is sleeping. Instead, the smart alerter will only alarm if an engineer is sleeping because it will be able to tell if a person is sleeping. It will also be able to determine if a person is engaged in any of those half asleep, daydreaming, distracted modes of consciousness that you mentioned, and will alarm for those too. So for the alerter function, this smart alerter will do everything that is needed to assure alertness. It cannot be reset reflexively by a sleeping person, and it will completely monitor consciousness from wide awake, fully alert to sound asleep and everything in between. And the smart alerter will also capture all of the information that it picks up in monitoring employees. This information will be part of an employee’s record, and it will be analyzed for indications of sleep disorders or simply fatigue resulting from neglecting proper rest. So yes, it will be a tool for diagnosing sleep disorders as I predicted a year ago, and it will also be real time consciousness monitor that can stop the train if it finds the engineer incapacitated or even distracted to a significant degree. It really fulfills every need in this topic of operator fatigue in safety sensitive work. With the current alerters, an engineer can fall asleep 100 times a shift and if it does not result in an accident, nobody will ever know. With the smart alerters, the 100 instances of falling asleep will be recorded and be added to an employee’s record. It also eliminates the need and purpose of inward facing cameras, but I wonder what labor unions will say about the intrusiveness of the smart alerters. </div>
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag