ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Mental fatigue is usually accompanied by a sense of weariness, reduced alertness, and reduced mental performance, which can lead to accidents, decrease of productivity in workplace and several other health hazards. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to assess mental fatigue of students while reading for a prolonged duration of time by application of electroencephalography (EEG). METHODS: Ten healthy students (27.57±3.4 years; 5 females and 5 males), participated in the study. The experimental design consisted of 5 blocks of 15-min length, in total 75âmin for each participant. The experiment was done without any reading activities at the first block. In the following, participants studied the texts and corrected the mistakes. In each block EEG (beta, alpha, and theta power), and the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS) were recorded. RESULTS: The mean of the self-assessment of sleepiness by KSS from the first to final 15 minutes were 2.3, 3.4, 4.3, 5.2, and 6.1, respectively. The average power in the theta band decreased from 1.23µV2/Hz at the first 15-min period to 1.02µV2/Hz at the last 15-min period. Also, mean power in the alpha band decreased from 0.85µV2/Hz at the first 15-min period to 0.59µV2/Hz at the last 15-min period. CONCLUSION: The study showed that the KSS and EEG activity indicate sleepiness which were highly correlated, with both changing along with performance.
Subject(s)
Electroencephalography , Wakefulness , Attention , Female , Humans , Male , StudentsABSTRACT
Background: Resilience engineering (RE) is a new approach to upgrade safety management systems. Due to its novelty in the field of safety, RE seems to be promising in providing good indicators to assess priorities in organizational strengths/weaknesses while planning to promote safety within organizations. Several methods have been recently developed to evaluate REperformance. The current study is an attempt to quantify and determine the priorities of REdimensions in a steel industry using analytic network process (ANP). Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 489 male workers of a steel industry participated. For this purpose, the RE questionnaire was distributed among workers and, then, super decisions software (version 3.2) was used to analyze the data. Results: The results indicated that there was a sufficient level of RE in the organization where top management commitment with normalized weight 0.1781 and awareness-opacity with normalized weight 0.1483 were ranked as the first and last priorities of the organization, respectively. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that the top management system, with the adoption of safety policies, has been able to improve the performance of RE in the organization. Managers should consider appropriate measures to improve the RE situation.
