Insights

Every five minutes, a tester asks a drowsy driver a question: How sleepy are you, on a scale of 1 to 9? The driver answers. For the next few minutes, they are less sleepy. Optalert has now reviewed drowsy-driving data from many leading tier-1 and tier-2 automotive suppliers. We regularly see the same pattern in...

Driving drunk is a specific offence in almost every country, with a legislated threshold and a roadside test to enforce it. Driving drowsy is dangerous in much the same way, and in most jurisdictions it is not a specific offence at all. The gap is not indifference. It is a measurement problem. The short answer...

Some of the worst industrial and transport accidents on record share a factor that appears in the investigation reports but rarely in the headlines. The operators had not slept enough, were working through the body’s least alert hours, or had an untreated sleep disorder. Which major disasters have been linked to drowsiness? Official investigations have...

Sleep loss does not announce itself. A worker who slept five hours looks the same as one who slept eight, reports for the same shift, and believes they are functioning normally. The measurable difference in their performance is substantial, and it appears after a single bad night. The short answer Sleep deprivation degrades reaction time,...

Most employers have no idea how much undiagnosed sleep apnoea is costing them, for a straightforward reason: The condition is common, expensive, and almost entirely invisible to the health programmes already running in their workplace. The short answer Obstructive sleep apnoea affects close to 30% of working-age adults in the United States, and 80 to...

Two separate European requirements govern drowsiness detection in passenger vehicles, and they are routinely confused. One is law. The other is a consumer rating. They set different thresholds, are verified differently, and in January 2026 moved further apart rather than closer together. What the EU General Safety Regulation requires of a DDAW system Regulation (EU)...

The Johns Drowsiness Scale (JDS™) is a validated neurological biomarker that scores a person’s impairment from drowsiness on a scale of 0 to 10, derived entirely from the movements of their eyelids. It was developed by Optalert founder Dr. Murray Johns, the sleep scientist who also created the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), and it is...

Since July 2024, all new models of passenger vehicles in Europe require a driver monitoring system (DMS) that can detect drowsiness. Engineering teams across the automotive industry have scrambled to learn about the science of drowsiness and develop systems that can detect it in drivers. Each of these systems then needs to be validated and...

Microsleeps are invisible, unpredictable, and more common than most people realise. The only way to prevent them is to detect the impairment that comes before them. Key summary: In this article, we examine microsleeps, which are one of the most dangerous and least understood phenomena in fatigue science. We explore: Why microsleeps are largely undetectable...

Human perception is a poor indicator of drowsiness. In industries where worker safety is paramount, relying on self-assessment alone can introduce serious operational risks. Key summary: In this article, we discuss why humans are fundamentally poor at assessing their own drowsiness, particularly in safety-critical environments like mining and transport. It explores: Why subjective awareness of...