An Educational Intervention to Promote Safe Driving

Finnish Institute of Occupational Health54 enrolled

Overview

The general aim of the study is to promote safe, economic, and environmental-friendly driving among long-haul truck drivers. To do this, the investigators will conduct an on-road study on i) the relationship of driver sleepiness and stress with driving behaviour and fuel consumption and ii) effectiveness of an educational intervention in mitigating sleepiness at the wheel. The educational intervention is designed to be employed by occupational health care professionals in the future. This solution clearly facilitates the implementation of the intervention into practice if it turns out to be effective. The investigators specified research questions are the following: * Do truck driver sleepiness and stress at the wheel reach levels that affect driving behaviour, fuel consumption and carbon emissions? * What are the sources of sub-optimal arousal at the wheel in truck drivers? * Can truck driver sleepiness be mitigated by an educational intervention, and if yes, does it improve driving behaviour and decrease fuel consumption and carbon emissions as well?

Study Type

INTERVENTIONAL

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

SINGLE

Enrollment

Conditions

Driver Sleepiness

Interventions

Experimental group took part in a single half-day (4 hours) fatigue management training grounded on Problem Based Learning (PBL).

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 20 YearsMax age: 65 YearsHealthy volunteers:

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: * working as a truck driver at the moment of the study * having both day and night trips * having at least 2 years of experience in truck driving Exclusion Criteria: * not fluent in Finnish (the intervention is in Finnish)

Locations (1)

Finnish Institute of Occupational Health

Helsinki, Finland

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

driver sleepiness

Self-reported sleepiness measured by the the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale Questionnaire and behavioral sleepiness measured by the Observer Rating of Drowsiness (based on video materia).

Time frame: one year

Secondary Outcomes

driver stress

Self-rating scale of stress and heart rate measures of stress (heart rate variability)

Time frame: one year

sleep

wrist-worn actigraphy and sleep diary based measures of sleep quantity, timing and quality

Time frame: one year

driving behaviour

vehicle movement-based measures of driving behaviour (speed, accelerations, deceleration)

Time frame: one year

Data from ClinicalTrials.gov

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