ICS News Archive

Dean Stern co-chairs panel on driver fatigue research methods, statistical approaches

Hal Stern, Ted and Janice Smith Family Foundation Dean and professor of statistics, is spearheading the effort to gather better research and minimize risks for commercial motor carriers as co-chair of a new National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine research panel. The “Panel on Research Methodologies and Statistical Approaches to Understanding Driver Fatigue Factors in Motor Carrier Safety and Driver Health” seeks to improve research methods on commercial motor vehicle (CMV) operators and their sleep and safety habits while on the job. Matthew Rizzo, Francis and Edgar Reynolds Professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, serves as Stern’s fellow co-chair.

“Approximately 4,000 fatalities due to truck and bus crashes occur each year, 10 percent to 20 percent of which are estimated to involve fatigued drivers,” according to a news release on the panel’s latest report. CMV operators are at particular risk of insufficient sleep due to the stressors of their work, such as irregular schedules and economic pressures. CMV operators also have a higher risk of developing chronic health problems due to such stressors, including “obstructive sleep apnea, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, adult-onset diabetes, and other conditions commonly associated with obesity,” according to the news release.

Still, research on the CMV operator demographic is complicated “by the difficulty of measuring driver fatigue objectively, invasive nature of capturing measures of the amount and quality of drivers' sleep, and many factors contributing to crashes that are unrelated to lack of sleep,” the news release says. An additional data gap stems from the difficulty of obtaining quality data from small carriers compared to large carriers.

With these research difficulties in mind, the panel recommends the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to improve their research methods. Specifically, it calls on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and/or the U.S. Department of Transportation to “fund, design, and conduct an ongoing survey that will allow longitudinal comparisons of CMV drivers to enable tracking of changes in their health status and the factors likely to be associated with those changes over time.”

For more information, see the complete record at the National Academies’ Current Project site.