Fatigue Monitor Is Awakening Interest

TRENTON, N.J. — Ever worry about the truck driver in the next lane falling asleep at the wheel or the engineer on your commuter train dozing off?

So do government transportation and military experts, who have seen the sometimes gruesome results of pilots and drivers losing control because of fatigue or stress.

That’s why some government planners are looking with interest at an invention that uses electrodes on the skin to monitor workers’ alertness and stress levels.

Its developers--three Russian immigrant scientists, a Polish physician and a New Jersey doctor--say it can provide a warning when a ship’s pilot or an air traffic controller or a nuclear plant operator can no longer work safely.

“This thing is revolutionary,” boasts Leon B. Shlossberg, a Russian engineering consultant whose home serves as headquarters for the company he heads, PALS Technology Consultants. “We just need to [get it into] the right hands, and it will spread all over the country. It will help people.”

Tired workers are a serious safety problem, says Joseph Canny, deputy assistant secretary for transportation policy in the U.S. Department of Transportation. He cited government statistics showing that fatigue is blamed for about 30% of fatal truck crashes, while about 200,000 auto accidents per year are related to fatigue.

The Federal Railroad Administration blamed seven train wrecks from 1993 to 1995 on engineers falling asleep. Engineer fatigue is one of the possible factors that the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating in the crash in February of two NJ Transit trains in Jersey City that killed two engineers and a passenger and injured 162.

And the Federal Aviation Administration believes that fatigue is a factor in some commercial airline crashes blamed on pilot error.

PALS Technology hopes that government agencies, transportation businesses and other safety-sensitive industries will use its patented device to spot overtired operators and rest or replace them before an accident occurs.

Scientific research director Alexander Zufrin of Arlington, Mass., developed systems to monitor humans’ mental state for two decades in Moscow, including top-secret work testing astronauts in a space shuttle program.

PALS’ system, based partly on Zufrin’s past research, uses small electrodes placed on a person’s arms, legs or torso to compare changes in electrophysical signals from the heart, lungs and skin with baseline data taken when the person is rested.

Once the system is fine-tuned, wireless electrodes will be able to transmit the data by satellite relay to a remote supervisor monitoring a crew of pilots, drivers or other workers.

Computerized equipment analyzes the data, giving a readout indicating whether the person is alert and calm enough to work safely, said PALS administrative director Konrad Juszkiewicz. The other partners are mathematician Leonid Sitnikov and internist Dr. Alan Lichtbroun, an assistant professor at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick.

Workers could be signaled when they are overtired or overloaded, before they would realize it on their own, and ordered to rest or shift some tasks to a co-worker. Eventually even individual motorists could have a device to warn them when they are nodding off.

Zufrin says the monitoring system also could be used to determine whether a worker is under the influence of drugs or alcohol. And he said it has potential uses in medicine: predicting heart, asthma and epilepsy attacks; diagnosing some hormonal diseases, and evaluating the effectiveness of medical treatments.

At the Naval Air Warfare Center in Patuxent River, Md., engineers spent two months this summer testing the system on fighter pilots under a $30,000 contract with PALS. They are comparing the data with other measures of the pilots’ performance, says Norman Warner, chief scientist in the cruise systems department.

“If it looks promising, our plans are to continue to develop this system,” he says. “The affordability is there.”

The Navy, Warner notes, is particularly interested in using the system to warn tactical pilots making tight, high-speed turns when to back off to prevent sudden blackouts caused by G-force, the multiplied gravitational pull during acceleration. Such blackouts sometimes cause crashes, killing pilots and destroying expensive planes.

The Coast Guard recently began testing the device at its research and development center in Groton, Conn. Canny says the Federal Railroad Administration also is looking at it.

Vincent J. Mariano, president of Fort Pierce, Fla.-based Safety Consulting Service, says fatigue is a major cause of accidents in the trucking business.

“If we can come up with a method to monitor it,” he says, “it’s going to be something very, very astounding in our business.”