ISYE6093
Human-Integrated System
Week 07- Session 11
Stress, Workload, Safety, Accidents, and
Human Error
Learning Outcome
• To explain the factors that contribute to accidents
in human integrated system field
• To apply the safety management in manufacturing
industries
Outline
Environmental and psychological stressor
Life stress and workload overload
Fatigue and sleep disruption
Safety and accident prevention
Factors that cause or contribute to accidents
ENVIRONMENTAL AND
PSYCHOLOGICAL STRESSOR
Introduction
• Three kind of stresses that affects on human or individual
performance:
– Time pressure (workload)
– Threat and anxiety, and
– Imposed by factors in the environment
• The concept of stress is most easily understood in the
context of Figure 1. On the left of figure is a set of stressors,
influence of information availability and processing that are
not inherent in the content of that information itself
A Representation
of Stress Effects
Stressors
• Stressor include such influences as noise, vibration, heat
and dim lighting as well as such psychological factors as
anxiety , fatigue, frustration, and anger.
• Forces typically have 4 effects:
1) They produce a psychological experience
2) Closely linked
3) Stressors affect the efficiencies
4) Stressors may have long-term negative consequences for
health
Environmental Stressors
• It is reasonable to argue that any stressor that produces
delayed effects should trigger steps to reduce its
magnitude, whether or not it also induces effects on
concurrent performance.
• In contrast, those stressors that induce only direct
effects may be tolerated as long as the level of
performance lost sacrifices neither safety nor
performance quality.
Motion
• Stress effects of motion can result from either
sustained motion or cyclic motion.
• The effects of cyclic motion, also called vibration,
including both high-frequency vibration, which may
lead to performance decrements or repetitive motion
disorders, and low-frequency vibration, which is
another cause of motion sickness.
Differentiate between High and Low
Frequency Vibrations
• High-frequency Vibrations
– It is specific to a particular limb, such as the vibration produced
by a handled power saw, or whether it influences the whole
body, such as that from a helicopter or ground vehicle.
• Low-frequency Vibration and Motion Sickness
– Motion effects at a much lower frequency, such as the regular
sea swell on a ship, the slightly faster rocking of a light airplane
in flight, or the environment of a closed cab in a tank or ground
vehicle, can lead to motion sickness.
Thermal Stress and
Air Quality
• Both excessive heat and excessive cold can produce
performance degradation and health problems. It is
required to representation of a comfort zone, which define
a region in the space of temperature and humidity.
• Poor air quality is often a consequence of poor ventilation in
closed working spaces like mines or ship tanks but also
increasingly in environments polluted by smog or carbon
monoxide.
Psychological Stressors
• Psychological stressors specially those stressors resulting
from the perceived threat of harm or loss of esteem (i.e.
potential embarrassment) , of something valued, or of body
function through injury or death.
• Psychological stressors includes:
– Cognitive appraisal
– Ethical issues
– Level of arousal
– Performance changes with over arousal
– Remediation of psychological stress
Performance vs. Level of
Arousal
Case Study
• Relationship Between Job Stress, Workload, Environment
and Employees Turnover Intentions: What We Know, What
Should We Know.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.
388.7056&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Life stress and workload
overload
Introduction
• There is another large category of stressors related to
stressful circumstances on the job and in the worker’s
personal life that can lead to disruption in performance.
• The cause of both of these types stress may be related to
the different aspects of attention:
– Poorer performance by those who are stresses by job related factors
(e.g., poor working conditions, inequality wages) may be related to
the lack of attention.
– In contrast, the greater safety hazards of some who suffer life stress
may be related to distraction or diversion of attention.
General Approaches
• Three general approaches to review of stress in
organization:
– Address and remove the source of stress within the organization
(i.e., low pay, long working hours, future job uncertainty)
– Implement stress management programs that can teach workers
strategies for dealing with stress
– Provide counselors to individuals
Workload Overload
• Stress can be imposed by having too much to do in too lithe
time. The high workload apparently caused the workers to
neglect the key task of machine monitoring.
• How workload can be predicted and how it is measured?
Timeline Model
• The concept of workload can be most easily and intuitively
understood in terms of a ratio of the time required, TR, (to
do the task) to the time available, TA, (to do them in). That
is, the ratio TR/TA.
• Figure 3 shows laying out timeline of when different task
need to be performed and how long they typically take.
Timeline Analysis
Objectives of Timeline
Model
• This calculation can be designed to accomplish two
objectives:
1) It should predict how much workload a human experiences, a
subjective state that can be measured.
2) It should predict the extent to which performance will suffer
because overload.
• Figure 4 shows these two effects are not entirely linked.
Ratio TR/TA
Factors to Construct Task
Timeline
1. Identification of task times
2. Scheduling and prioritization
3. Task resource demands and automaticity
4. Multiple resources
Demand Checklist
• Table 1 lists the specific task factors that contribute to the
demand.
Mental Workload
Measurement
• Traditionally, workload has been assessed by one of four
different techniques:
1. Primary task measures
2. Secondary task methods
3. Physiological measures
4. Subjective measure
5. Workload dissociation
Fatigue and sleep
disruption
Introduction
• High mental workload can have two effects; while
performing a task, performance may degrade. But the effects
of high and even moderate mental workload are also
cumulative in terms of the buildup of fatigue in a way that
can adversely affect performance on subsequent tasks or on
the same tasks after a prolonged period of performance
without rest.
• Fatigue, as a stressor, clearly degrades performance and
creates problem in maintaining attention.
• The role of fatigue also becomes relevant in predicting the
consequences of long-duration, sustained operation, or
continuous performance.
Vigilance and Under-arousal
• Based on accident and incident analysis, reveals that
maintaining sustained attention to vigilance tasks in low-
arousal environments can be just as fatiguing and just as
prone to human vulnerabilities as the high-workload
situation.
• The characteristic causes of the vigilance decrement:
– Time
– Event salience
– Signal rate
– Arousal level
Vigilance Remediation
• The four primary factors identified (time, event salience,
signal rate, and arousal level) suggest some appropriate
solutions to the vigilance problem.
1) Watches or vigils should not be made too long, and operators
should be given fairly frequent rest breaks.
2) Signal should be made more salient.
3) If miss rates are high, it is possible to alter the operator’s criterion
for detecting signal through payoffs.
4) Efforts should be made to create or sustain a higher level of
arousal.
Sleep Disruption
• Sleep disruption is a major, although not the only,
contributor to fatigue. Sleep disruption incorporates the
influence the influence of three separate factors:
1) Sleep deprivation or sleep loss, referring to less than the 7 to
9 hours of sleep per night that the average adult receives
2) Performance at the low point of the daily rhythms in the early
hours of the morning
3) Disruption of those daily rhythms
Circadian Disruption
• Circadian disruption, characterizes the circumstances in
which a person is trying to sustain a level of activity that is
out of synchrony with internal circadian rhythm and its
associated level of arousal (i.e. jet lag and shift work)
– Jet lag is caused after crossing several time zones, when the ongoing
circadian rhythm becomes out of synchrony with the-night cycle at
the destination, and need 3-5 days to adjust, or adapt.
– Shiftwork. Proposed strategies are to assign workers permanently to
different shifts and employed, to maintain a fairly continuous
rotation of shifts.
Safety and accident
prevention
Introduction
• Table 1 shows the major causes of workplace injury and
death as reported by the National Safety Council.
Safety Legislation
• Safety in the workplace has been strongly impacted by
legislation over the last 100 years. It is generally recognized
that during the 1800s, workers performed their duties
under unsafe and unhealthful conditions.
• When an accident occurred, the only means for the
employees to obtain compensation was to prove the
employer’s negligence, which was defined as “failure to
exercise a reasonable amount of care or to carryout a legal
duty so that injury or property damage occurs to another”.
Worker’s Compensation
and Liability
• The goals of worker’s compensation include:
– Provide sure, prompt, and reasonable income and medical benefits
to work-accident victims or income benefits to their dependents,
regardless of fault.
– Provide a single remedy to reduce court delays, costs, and
workloads arising out of personal-injury litigation.
– Eliminating payment of fees to lawyers and witnesses as well as
time-consuming trials and appeals.
– Encourage maximum employer interest in safety and rehabilitation
through an experience-rating mechanism
– Promote the study of cause of accidents
Establishment of
OSHA and NIOSH Agencies
• In the 1960s, many people felt that the state legislated laws
were still inadequate; many industries still had poor safety and
health standard, and injury and death rates were still too high.
• As a result, in 1970, the federal government acted to impose
certain safety standards on industry by signing into effect the
Occupational Safety and Health Act. This act established the
administrative arm, Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA).
• One other federal organization is also important to the human
factors profession, the National Institute for Occupational
Safety and Health (NIOSH).
Product Liability
• It specified that a product is defective when it “failed to perform
safely as an ordinary user would expect when it was used in an
untended or reasonably foreseeable manner, or if the risk
inherent in the design outweighed the benefits of that design”.
• Two important implications of this judgment for human factors:
– The concept of reasonably foreseeable
– The tradeoff between risk and benefit
• Human factors specialist are central to product liability is in
helping manufacturers design safer products to avoid litigation
in their first place.
Factors that cause or
contribute to accidents
Introduction
• Some factors affect performance of the worker more
indirectly. For example, one social/psychological factor is the
existence of social norms in the workplace.
• Social norms may support unsafe behavior, such as taking
off protective gear, using unsafe lifting practices, or walking
into unsafe work area.
The picture shows one particular view of the system
approach proposed by Slappendel et al. (1993).
Model of causal factors in occupational injuries
Causal and Contributing
Factors for Accidents
Personnel Characteristics
• The important factors from personnel characteristics that
affect safe behavior:
– Age and gender
– Job experience
– Stress, fatigue, drugs, and alcohol
• A number of factors associated with industry personnel
increase the likelihood of accidents as shown in Figure 14.2.
Job Characteristics
• Factors that affect safe behavior from jobs characteristics:
– Equipment
– Control and displays
– Electrical hazards
– Mechanical hazards
• Cutting or tearing of skin, muscle, or bone
• Shearing
• Crushing
• Breaking
• Straining
– Pressure and toxic substance hazards
Physical Environment
• The physical environment that affect safe behavior includes:
– Illumination
– Noise and vibration
– Temperature and humidity
– Fire hazards
– Radiation hazards
– Falls
– Exits and emergency evacuation
Social Environment
• The social environment that affect safe behavior includes:
– Human error
– Error classification
• Intended
– Knowledge-based mistake (failure of
perception/understanding)
– Rule-based mistake (selection of wrong if-then rule)
– Violation (intentionally did the wrong thing)
• Unintended, e.g. slip and lapse
– Errors and system safety
– Error remediation
CONCLUSION
Conclusion
• Stress comes in a variety of forms from a variety of causes and exhibits a
variety of symptoms.
• The underlying concern for human factors is the potential risk to health
and degradation in performance on tasks that may be otherwise well
human factored.
• Issues of workload overload have always confronted the worker in
society. However, two trends appear to make the issue of under load
one of growing concern:
– The continued push for productivity in all domain appears to be increasing (night
work and sleep disruption).
– Increasing capabilities of automation are now placing the human more frequently in
the role of the passive monitor.
References
• Wickens, C. D., Lee, J. D., Liu, Y., & Gordon-Becker, S. E. (2014). An
Introduction to Human Factors Engineering. ISBN 13: 978-1-292-
02231-4.
• Mark R. Lehto and Steven J. Landry. (2013). Introduction to Human
Factors and Ergonomics for Engineers, Second Edition. CRC Press. ISBN
13: 978-1-4665-8416-7.
• https://bit.ly/2NUAvjK
• https://bit.ly/2qqT8D9
Thank You
