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Asleep at the wheel... * UK - How tiredness was targeted as a killer on the road
Sleep expert Professor Jim Horne and his team were the first in the UK to recognise the real problem of falling asleep at the wheel
Yorkshire,UK -The Yorkshire Post, by Sheena Hastings -6 March 2008: -- Back in the early 1990s, accident report forms filled in by police didn't even have a question or box to be ticked concerning the sleepiness of a driver at the time of an incident... At around that time, sleep researchers at Loughborough University began working with Leicestershire and Cornwall police forces, analysing the circumstances of road crashes, and found that a fair chunk of them happened on mostly straight, boring roads in good weather conditions, where the driver was healthy and had not taken avoiding action before going over a white line and into a head-on collision... These sorts of accident tended to happen between midnight and 6am and 2-4pm – times when the body experiences a natural "circadian dip", and is likely to be sluggish and sleepy... As a result of research into driver sleepiness by Jim Horne and his team at Loughborough's Sleep Research Centre, the accident report form for all police forces changed to include a box querying whether officers "suspect sleepiness"... If the box is ticked, the force can call in the experts like Prof Horne to pinpoint whether the accident does indeed fit the criteria for SRVA (Sleep-Related Vehicle Accident)... It's now reckoned that sleepy drivers cause one in five motorway crashes and one in 10 of all road accidents in the UK... (Aftermath: The scene of the Great Heck crash in February 2001)Labels: asleep at the wheel
posted by Unknown @ 7:16 PM
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