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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."
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.
But what if you don't know its a hallucination? By God, man, what if those flying pink ponies are real!?
.. 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
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.
That's called hypnagogic imagery :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fwwT5jp-dA
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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)
Once in Pre-Ranger, we were in the field for 7 days and got around 2 hours of sleep TOTAL. Everyone was falling asleep, standing, walking, it didn't matter. Lay in the prone for a minute and you would have a dream that you were in the prone with a rifle, pulling security.... like your brain had to trick you to thinking you were awake just so it could get some rest.
Anyway, I was laying there pulling security in the patrol base while the PL planned the next mission and me and this white rabbit were talking about what we were going to eat when the school was over. We talked about sleeping for a few days and ordering pizza, etc, it went on for a while.
My battle buddy nudged me to tell me i had fallen asleep, and I actually tried to argue that I had been awake the whole time. "I wasn't sleeping, I was just talking to the.... nevermind."
THL phish sticks
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.