Cases of heavy vehicle driver fatigue and distraction around the globe have risen 42 per cent in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, as pressure mounts on transport and logistics.
Using data gathered from 26 countries where its driver monitoring technology is in operation, Canberra-based company Seeing Machines is observing the issue climbing in real time, and its operators now playing a significant role in keeping drivers and the highways safe.
Seeing Machines, which won the ACT 2019 exporter of the year award, says that since mid-March heavy vehicle fleets are plying the roads more to maintain essential supplies with 31 per cent of fleets logging longer driver operating hours each day.
Melody Black, the company's director of operations, said that heavy vehicles are also travelling 35 per cent longer distances, and around a third of 32 per cent of fleets are operating more vehicles each day to keep up with demand.
Fatigue is the number one enemy of heavy vehicle operation. Heavy trucks account for just 2.3 per cent all road vehicles and while their contribution to road trauma was significant out of proportion to their volume two decades ago, that number has flat-lined in the past 10 years.
This is largely due to the tougher regulatory environment and the arrival of more stringent "observation" of driver behaviour, particularly in large, commercial fleets, through devices such as those offered by Seeing Machines.
In Australia, the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator has strict compliance around how long drivers are permitted to remain behind the wheel until they are required to take a mandatory rest break.
For instance, if a solo driver works 14 hours in a 24-hour period, there is a requirement for 7 hours of continuous, stationary rest time.
However, regulations differ in overseas countries and pressures on operators to hit on-time delivery targets, regardless of where they work, are steadily rising as the global pandemic places pressure on getting goods delivered to market.
Seeing Machines' Guardian technology uses a camera trained on the driver's face, integrated with a sophisticated algorithm which can detect facial changes and movements which signal drowsiness or distraction.
This alert trigger vibrates the driver's seat and sends the footage of the incident to one of two Seeing Machines monitoring centres, one in Canberra and another in Tucson, Arizona.
Analysts examine the footage and classify the event, and advise fleet managers accordingly.
For national operators like Finemore's Transport, which has 250 prime movers hauling goods and liquid fuels up and down the east coast of Australia and whose trucks provide the vital supply link to Canberra's Woolworth's supermarkets, fatigue intervention technology has been a gamechanger in fleet safety.
"Our fleet is doing in excess of 52 million kilometres a year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and we would not operate our fleet without the technology," Finemore's managing director Mark Parry said.
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"You do not know when a driver is going to have a microsleep.
"It can happen within the first two hours of a shift, it's not always happening at night and it's not always deep in people's roster.
"The natural assumption is that it's drivers that have probably worked three or four days in a row, perhaps getting toward the end of their roster or shift. Not so. We've had drivers on their first shift back after a break and are one or two hours in to their shift and have had a fatigue event."
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