HI-TECH SUIT TO SIMULATE EXHAUSTION
On Thursday night, I arrived back into Dublin Airport on a flight from Marrakech, where I had been test-driving the all-new Citroën C5 Aircross SUV, a fine car especially on dodgy roads high in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. I had been up since 6am Irish time, and it now was midnight, and I always am aware of tiredness.
Fortunately, with Cathal Murray playing great tunes on RTÉ Radio One’s Late Date, I was fine and not sleepy at all, even though it was 2am when I got home to north Co. Wexford.
In truth, I’m not always so lucky, and on many an occasion have broken the journey in the Applegreen services at Coyne’s Cross, where a 30-minute nap and a cup of coffee are required before I press on.
The experts tell us that drowsiness and fatigue are major factors in one in five road crashes, and that driving after 18 hours awake can impair your driving responses to a degree that is comparable to exceeding the drink drive limit.
That’s why Ford commissioned a Sleep Suit to demonstrate the debilitating effect of tiredness, especially among the young, and it now will integrate the suit into the training process for its Driving Skills for Life (DSFL) programme for 17- to 24-yearolds.
‘Drive when you’re tired and you risk driving like a zombie – becoming a danger to yourself, your passengers and everyone on the road around you,’ says Dr Gundolf Meyer Hentschel, chief executive of the Meyer Hentschel Institute that developed the suit.
‘Young adults very often subject themselves to intentional sleep deprivation, forcing themselves to stay awake so that they can juggle the substantial demands of busy social lives, long working hours and studying for exams.’
The suit partly consists of special goggles that simulate extreme exhaustion, including microsleeps that can result in those behind the wheel driving blind for 10 seconds or more, sometime with their eyes still open.
Connected to a smartphone app, the goggles can be set to simulate the brain shutting down and the driver effectively seeing nothing ahead of them for half a second, then for increasingly long periods, up to 10 seconds.
Worn together with a specially designed cap, vest, arm and ankle bands – with a combined weight of more than 18 kilogrammes – the overall effect offers a disturbing insight into the degree to which tired drivers are impaired.
It’s a sobering lesson for all. If you’re tired, pull over and have a coffee if you can, and a snooze. It might be the difference between life and death.