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Fatigue Science announces release of 14-Day Fatigue Forecasting, enabling workforce planning 14 days in advance

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Readi Enterprise Suite, the Fatigue Management Information System from Fatigue Science, is widely relied upon for its ability to provide objective historical and real-time visibility into workforce fatigue. Now, the release of 14-Day Fatigue Forecasting expands this visibility into the future, providing the world’s first “360º view of fatigue – past, present, and future.” With this advancement, proactive planning measures and proactive safety-critical actions that were previously impossible are now visible and achievable.

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Introducing the Fatigue Science 90-Day Pilot Program

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Mining truck at a mining site.

When introducing a new initiative into a workforce, it’s important to prepare for feedback, change management, and policy development. With that in mind, Fatigue Science provides a 90-day Pilot Program to help implement Readi™ Enterprise Suite as part of your company’s approach to fatigue risk management.

During your 90-day pilot, a Fatigue Science advisor will work with operations leaders and health and safety managers to understand the outcomes you’re looking to achieve with your deployment of Readi Enterprise Solution. Whether you’re looking to reduce fatigue exposure to improve safety, productivity, or both, an advisor can help select the best staff at your company, and create a deployment plan that fits your pilot objectives.

Readi™ Enterprise Suite 

Fatigue Science’s 90-Day Pilot Program gives you the opportunity to trial the Readi Enterprise Suite Solution with leadership, supervisors, and staff:

  • Readi provides personal Fatigue Alerts on mobile and wrist with compatible wearables, as well as a daily Fatigue Forecast upon wake-up, providing at-a-glance insight into personal fatigue risks for the day ahead. Users additionally receive sleep and fatigue insights such as a ReadiScore™ that allows them to make better choices based on their risk level.
  • ReadiSupervise enables supervisors to monitor current and upcoming fatigue levels of each member of their crew, with an “on-duty dashboard” and risk alert notifications. These tools enable informed interventions in cases of critical fatigue, as well as the planning of key tasks, ultimately driving productivity and reducing accidents.
  • ReadiAnalytics™ provides aggregated insights into workforce fatigue at the group-, location-, and organization-level, enabling management to establish a fatigue baseline, identify problem areas, and track improvements over time relative to meaningful targets. Insights for leaders can inform planning for resource allocation, fatigue training, and schedule optimization, further driving safety and productivity.

Your advisor will help to break down the data from each of these applications to target your key metrics, as well as to discuss potential fatigue management strategies.

Orienting Yourself and Your Staff

A pilot program typically lasts three months, which provides time for workforce orientation with Readi, identification of trends, and strategies to reduce fatigue-related risk in your workforce.

A pilot covers all phases of Readi’s use within your organization, from pre-launch and the initial roll-out, managing participation, data collection and analysis, actionable takeaways, and next steps.

By the end of your pilot program, you will be prepared to:

  • Understand the level of fatigue exposure across your company. This includes clear takeaways for leadership, supervisors, and staff that can help to reduce fatigue risks at all levels.
  • Determine a path forward for utilizing the predictive fatigue risk management tools of Readi Enterprise Suite on an ongoing basis in your operation. This includes a breakdown of the targets that will help you to reach your organizational goals and the methods to measure them.
  • Identify and adjust for the root causes of fatigue within your company and implement solutions. This includes adjusting work schedules, optimizing processes, and introducing training to educate staff.
  • Understand how daily sleep and fatigue insights can allow participants to optimize their work day, plan for sleep, and increase awareness of heightened fatigue risk.

Talk to Our Team!

As no two workplaces are the same, fatigue risk management strategies must be tailored to meet the unique needs of an organization. Whether your work environment includes shift work, long commutes, or high-risk work, your plan for fatigue management should be comprehensive.

Our pilot program is designed with the complexity of your organization in mind. To speak with one of our advisors about implementing a 90-day pilot within your company, contact our team here.

Interested in learning more about data-driven fatigue management?

BOOK A PRODUCT DEMO

or download our free eBook on the Science of Sleep for industrial workforces

About Fatigue Science

Fatigue Science is the leading provider of predictive human performance data in heavy industry, elite sports, and military. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, we build software that leverages scientifically-validated biomathematical models in order to quantify and predict the cumulative effects of sleep disruption on human reaction time and cognitive effectiveness. Our solutions enable organizations to optimize operations, reduce risk, and drive performance and productivity improvements — both at an individual- and enterprise-level. With proven impact, return on investment, and significant and growing traction in heavy industry, military, and elite sports, Fatigue Science serves cutting-edge organizations who understand the importance of sleep as well as the value of data-driven decision-making.

Introducing ReadiAnalytics: real-time objective visibility into workforce fatigue

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Unlike subjective methods for estimating crew fatigue, ReadiAnalytics captures anonymous sleep data from a sample of crew workers and then processes it alongside a variety of circadian factors with a scientifically-validated biomathematical model. The model then quantifies which on-duty crews will be the most and least fatigued, and how that fatigue will trend over time as their shift pattern progresses. Crucially, worker privacy is preserved, as insights are anonymized and aggregated for each crew, site, and the company. 

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Sleeping giant: Fatigue Science sets sights on expansion, new markets for wearable tech and fatigue monitoring

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When Fatigue Science signed its first contract with a professional sports team in 2008-2009, understanding of wearable technology was in its infancy. And the idea that sleep was a key factor in professional sports was just starting to surface. Now the use of wearable tech is exploding across professional sports and well beyond. And sleep? Sleep is widely recognized as amongst the most important factors in elite human performance.

Fatigue Science’s early combination of scientifically validated sleep monitoring and wearable technology is not only continuing to push what is possible for professional athletes. Now it can predict fatigue across large industrial workforces. And that, could save lives.

“Our first NFL engagement, for example, was with the Seattle Seahawks,” says Fatigue Science CEO Sean Kerklaan. “At that point, capturing meaningful, accurate sleep and fatigue data on ten professional football players using wearable technology was difficult, to say the least. But we’ve come a long, long way and that early experience is translating into innovation.“

New markets for wearable tech and fatigue monitoring

Those early learnings came from joining professional sports teams like the Seahawks, the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks and the MLB’s Seattle Mariners. Fatigue Science travelled across North America for practices and training seminars, going to great lengths to analyze individual player’s sleep data, model travel and time zone impacts on performance and most importantly, to develop deep relationships with the people impacted by fatigue and its consequences.

However, large scale deployments remained a challenge because the technology, while exceptionally accurate, used to involve much more manual work. Many obstacles, solutions, friendships and a couple of Super Bowl appearances later, and Fatigue Science has refined a winning system; a much more automated, predictive one that promises to lead the future of wearable technology’s use for both professional teams and large industrial workforces in areas like mining and transportation.

“As we get set to launch a new version of our platform, I can say those early difficulties were definitely worth the effort,” says Kerklaan. “Deep engagements, shared determination and curiosity, working collaboratively through pain points with our clients, that’s the backbone of our business model. People remain our focus, even in the emerging tech sector, and always will. That’s why we continue to be so successful.

“The latest update to our product means we’ll not only be capable of serving our professional sports clients more effectively, but that we’re able to move into much larger engagements. And most important, we’re capable of predicting and preventing fatigue-related accidents in the industrial workplace, which is an enormous, often tragic issue.”

Nearly 65% of industrial accidents in surface mining alone are related to fatigue.

In the US alone, 100,000 crashes are the direct result of driver fatigue each year, resulting in an estimated 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries, and a cost of $12.5 billion. The Sleep, Activity, Fatigue, Effectiveness (SAFTE) model, licensed exclusively to Fatigue Science is scientifically validated and considered the most reliable predictor of fatigue by the US Department of Defense.

Risk Management for wearable tech

Advances in the Fatigue Science platform now allow exponentially more data to be gathered and processed. Fatigue Science can then provide predictive SAFTE scores for at-risk workforces in the thousands. These scores then prompt difference making decisions about fatigue impairment and danger at a glance, on a personal or company-wide mobile dashboard. And this, says Kerklaan, benefits elite teams in every industry.

“We continue to work closely with professional sports teams to improve elite human performance,” says Kerklaan. “Now we’re also helping organizations champion improved health and safety by quantifying something that has never been quantifiable. Something that happens to be among the most important indicators of industry’s biggest safety dangers: Fatigue.”

As the Fatigue Science platform continues to evolve and grow in order to serve larger, more complex organizations, so too does the company.

Recent changes to the Fatigue Science Board of Directors include the addition of Laurie Wallace as Chairman (Chairman of the Board, QuickMobile) and Dan Eisenhardt (Founder & CEO of Recon Instruments, GM of Intel New Devices Group). Both have been instrumental in helping guide the company through Series A financing, which is expected to complete shortly.

“We couldn’t dream of a better board than the one we have in place,” says Kerklaan. “Fatigue Science is well positioned and ready to lead further innovation in the wearable technology sector.”

Interested in learning more about data-driven fatigue management?

BOOK A PRODUCT DEMO

or download our free eBook on the Science of Sleep for industrial workforces

It’s not just physical: The difference between mental and physical fatigue

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We know athletes are exhausted in more ways than one, but it’s not just physical fatigue that’s affecting their performance. At Fatigue Science, when we talk about fatigue, we’re talking about reduced alertness, reaction time, and effectiveness—all of which manifest in the form of sub-optimal athletic performance. This mental fatigue results from inadequate sleep or when sleep and activities fall outside of our biological need to consistently sleep at night and be active in the day—it’s not the same as fatigue resulting from physical exertion.

Mental fatigue

Those who routinely obtain less than 7-9 hours of interrupted sleep per 24-hour period will have a high homeostatic drive for sleep as the body struggles to restore balance. In addition, scheduling inconsistencies often lead to a high circadian drive for sleep at exactly the wrong times of day as well as to sleep-initiation problems at night.

So, when athletes lose sleep due to any number of factors, when they’re unable to stick to a consistent bedtime due to travel or social engagements, and when they have to train or play at the “wrong” times in a new time zone, they’ll be faced with both a high homeostatic and a high circadian drive for sleep. The result will be impaired judgment, reaction time, and situational awareness—the hallmarks of poor mental effectiveness.

Physical fatigue

Physical effectiveness, or energy, is different. It’s a function of non-sleep and circadian-related factors such as the type, intensity and volume of exercise (or physical labor) as well as muscle fiber composition, neuromuscular characteristics, high energy metabolite stores, buffering capacity, ionic regulation, capillarization, and mitochondrial density. Physical energy can be viewed as the capacity to perform a certain amount and intensity of physical activity for a given period of time. Elite athletes, who routinely engage in high-intensity training, are far less susceptible to physical fatigue than those who are sedentary. They run faster, lift more weight, and perform for longer periods of time due to their enhanced physical conditioning.

The difference between mental and physical fatigue

Mental and physical energy are governed by very different underlying processes—they’re separate biological functions. Having said that, they can coexist.

If one’s physically exhausted due to high-intensity physical activity, they may struggle to run, lift, or play, but their alertness and concentration will remain intact. In fact, most research concludes that physical activity has either a positive effect or more often, little or no impact on mental performance.

However, when a person’s mentally exhausted due to sleep deprivation, their alertness will suffer while most aspects critical for physical performance will be preserved. And while sleep loss affects mood, motivation, judgement, situational-awareness, memory, and alertness, it doesn’t directly affect cardiovascular and respiratory responses to exercise of varying intensity, aerobic and anaerobic performance capability, or muscle strength and electromechanical responses. But, time-to-physical-exhaustion is shorter and their perception of exertion and endurance is distorted.

Even though physical fatigue has little to no impact on mental alertness, the reverse is true—the psychological realm has a great deal of impact on the physical. This is how a competitive decline takes root under conditions of sleep loss.

Learn more about the differences between mental and physical fatigue in this comprehensive eBook, The Science of Sleep. DOWNLOAD NOW.

References

Effects of physical activity and inactivity on muscle fatigue
Bogdanis G.C. (2012)

Neurocognitive Consequences of Sleep Deprivation
Durmer J.S., Dinges D.F. (2005)

The Effects of Physical Exertion on Cognitive Performance
Krausman A.S., Crowell III H.P., Wilson R.M. (2002)

Cognitive methods for assessing mental energy
Lieberman H.R. (2007)

Sleep deprivation and cardiorespiratory function. Influence of intermittent submaximal exercise
Plyley M.J., Shephard R.J., Davis G.M., Goode R.C. (1987)

Investigating the interaction between the homeostatic and circadian processes of sleep–wake regulation for the prediction of waking neurobehavioural performance
Van Dongen H.P.A., Dinges D.F. (2002)

Sleep deprivation and the effect on exercise performance
VanHelder T., Radomski M.W. (1989)

Global BC News: What effect does daylight savings time have on your body?

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Global BC news visited with Fatigue Science CEO, Sean Kerklaan, to learn more about the effects of daylight savings and why everyone should take advantage of the extra hour of sleep during the Fall time change.

There’s well-established evidence to suggest that when we set our clocks forward in the spring, that lost hour of sleep increases the number of car accidents even heart attacks the next day. But, the fall time change makes things more dangerous for pedestrians who are now leaving work in the dark. An American study found pedestrians were three times more likely to be fatally struck than prior to the fall time change. Daylight Saving Time can actually have an effect on our sleep patterns for up to a week. So when the clocks roll back tonight, don’t stay up late even if tempted – instead do the opposite take advantage of the extra sleep and do your body a favour.