Research needs and opportunities for reducing the adverse safety consequences of fatigue

Although there has been a significant amount of research on fatigue globally, it remains a major contributor to workplace and highway mortality and morbidity. Given its importance, a Hopkinton Conference was organized to review and discuss the state of knowledge in the area and to define future directions for research aimed at preventing or mitigating the consequences of fatigue. In all, five groups of international contributors produced six articles for this special issue, comprising state of the art reviews, along with a discussion of knowledge gaps and future research needs. In this concluding paper, we capture some of the major outcomes and recommendations from this process. These are organized into five topic areas: the link between fatigue and safety, demographic issues in fatigue, modeling and predicting fatigue, technological approaches to fatigue management, and organizational factors in fatigue management.