Fatigue is a major issue in work environments that involve 24-hour operations and roster/shift systems. Operations that are ongoing around the clock often mean workers have to work and sleep according to a certain pattern for extended periods.
A key challenge is how to design working and sleeping patterns to reduce, manage, or ideally mitigate chronic fatigue.
FOWI researchers, including Micah Wilson and Luke Strickland, have developed a Fatigue Modelling Framework (FIPS) and toolkit that can predict fatigue under
various work/sleep conditions.
Recently, the FIPS team submitted an application for the 2020 Curtinnovation Awards.
The Curtinnovation Awards represent Curtin University's commitment to ensuring that exceptional research outcomes translate into new products and services. The awards identify new technologies, products and services arising from research at Curtin, and to highlight commercial opportunities at Curtin both internally and to the wider business community.
As part of their application, the FIPS team outlined a strategy for commercialisation of FIPS and following a successful pitch to the Curtinnovation panel, the FIPS project is now a finalist for this year's awards!
An open-source version of the FIPS software is available from GitHub, and is associated with a manuscript entitled “FIPS: An R Package for Biomathematical Modelling of Human Fatigue Related Impairment” that has just been published in the Journal of Open Source Software.
And to top it off, project lead, Micah Wilson, was also awarded a Curtin Ignition 2020 scholarship and she will soon have the opportunity to gain the inspiration, motivation and the tools required to commercialise his innovation.
More information in the case study below about Predicting fatigue in 24-hour operations with the FIPS toolkit.