PubMed Health⌕ Search

PubMed · 15824617

Avoid sleepiness while driving.

Abstract

Returning to the office after a long work day, Kristin, a hospice nurse, learns that the nighttime on-call nurse is ill. Kristin agrees to take call and hopes it will be a slow night. Now it is 2 am and Kristin has to travel to a client's home. Yawning repeatedly and driving over the rumble strip on the highway, she turns on the radio and opens the car window to the chill air, trying to shock herself into alertness.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Kathleen Sitzman. 2005. Avoid sleepiness while driving.. https://doi.org/10.1097/00004045-200504000-00014

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related citations

Fragility and crash over-representation among older drivers in Western Australia.

This study assessed age-related and gender differences in the relative contribution of fragility and crash over-representation to serious injuries per crash-involved driver in Western Australia. Police-reported crashes for the period 1998-2003 were extracted from the Western Australian Road Injury Database. For each passenger vehicle driver age and gender group, serious injuries per crash-involved driver and driver involvements in crashes per 100 million vehicle-kilometre travelled (VKT) were calculated as the respective measure of fragility and crash over-representation. Results from the decomposition method of analysis showed that older drivers over the age of 70 sustained serious injury rates more than twice as high as those of the 30-59-year-old drivers. Fragility increased with age, contributing between 47% and 95% for drivers above 65 years, but crash over-representation was the dominant factor for male drivers above 80 years. In contrast, fragility contributed little to the excess injury risk of younger drivers under the age of 30. The importance of fragility as a contributing factor to the inflated serious injury risk per vehicle-kilometre travelled for older drivers suggested that road safety initiatives should be directed towards the protection of vehicle occupants as well as screening for their driving ability.

Accidents, Traffic↗

Influence of visibility out of the vehicle cabin on lane-change crashes.

The influence of lateral visibility from the vehicle cabin on safety was evaluated by examining the differences in lane-change crashes of four-door and two-door body styles of the same vehicle models. These two vehicle styles were used because B-pillars (the pillars between the front and rear seats) on four-door models are farther forward, and thus nearer the fore-aft position of the driver. (Furthermore, the B-pillars on two-door models can be narrower, and some two-door models have no B-pillars at all.) To control for driver differences between these two body styles, going-straight-ahead crashes were used for comparison. The analysis used 2000-2003 North Carolina crash data, and considered the crash experience of four-door and two-door body styles for the same 10 vehicles for model years 1995 and newer. The main finding is that four-door body styles are more likely to be involved in lane-change crashes than are two-door body styles of the same vehicle models. This finding suggests that lateral visibility out of the vehicle cabin affects safety.

Accidents, Traffic↗