Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

Maintenance and improvement of reliability of
individuals and groups
The first area of study to prevent accidents caused
by human error is that of human related studies
concerning:
Selection and deployment of persons who are less prone to
errors
One practical achievement of railway related research
into human science is the operation aptitude test
(Psychological aptitude test) implemented for the staff
engaged in train operation, such as train drivers, which
is required by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and
Transport.
The Psychological aptitude test consists of four tests:
Uchida-Kraepelin Performance Test, Intelligence Tests,
Choice Reaction Test, and Attention Distribution Test.
The Uchida-Kraepelin Performance Test is about job
performance; the Intelligence Test is about reasoning
ability; the Choice Reaction Test is about reaction to
speed and accuracy; and the Attention Distribution
Test is about attention span.
Training staffs who have the ability and attitude needed
to avoid errors
The rapid aging of the society and the fall in the size
of the younger population will make it necessary to
positively use elderly and female employees. The number
of older employees will increase in the future; thus it is
necessary to focus on physical fitness as a required factor
for drivers and other workers who work irregular hours
so that they could maintain a high safety level.
The Index of Physical Fitness (IPC) is proposed as one
of strong indexes for control of health and physical
conditions for accident prevention. The decline of
arousal level from midnight to early morning of high
score IPC subjects is smaller than low score IPC
subjects. (Satou et al., 2002) The targets of that training
are to identify the requirements and minimum level
of physical and mental abilities, health and physical
conditions needed for the safe performance of tasks. It
is essential to determine how to assess a person’s ability
to continue work and what to do in terms of work
conditions and environment.
Maintenance and administration of staff
Human Science conducted an opinion poll among
railway employees to identify their safety awareness.
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Individual perceptions of safety are affected by the
organization socio-psychological aspects, such as the
attitude and policy toward safety and communication
methods within the organization.
They also developed a method of assessing the safety
awareness level of an organization as objectively and
quantitatively as possible by using the approach for
hierarchical decision-making process (AHP).
Assessment and improvement of work environment
The second key to the prevention of human error
induced accidents is the study to assess and improve the
actual work environment and conditions that contribute
to error reduction. Lately, the numbers of studies have
been done to assess and improve the work environment
where train speeds are higher, traffic is denser and oneman
operation is introduced. It was found that one-man
drivers suffer from substantial mental stress in the event
of problems or accidents and that this effect persists.
As indexes to show the adequacy of work conditions
and environment, Human Science develops tools to
estimate the workload. There are physiological indexes
such as heart beat and the flickering and psychological
indexes using recognized symptoms test. One of the
results on such studies is a prototype “driver’s workload
questionnaire” that consist of six sets of criteria to easily
and accurately measure and judge the effect of long
working hours within the actual situations.
Accident analysis and safety management
Human Science collected data with the use of human
error-induced accident investigation card, which
consisted of a checklist of 65 items. Using this data,
they built a human error-induced accident database,
which is useful, both for the interpretation of individual
accidents and for statistic analysis. They are planning to
develop a system that performs rapid and detailed cause
analysis of an accident and suggests proper measures to
be taken.
Measures to prevent accidents at crossing
Although a number of accident at crossings is decreasing,
preventive measures for this kind of accident is one
of the most critical challenges in the field of human
science because of the still quite high accident count,
as well as the seriousness of the result. Recent work
includes the designing of a new model of crossing signs
with improved visibility and examination and proposal
of visibility measuring methodology that can be applied
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows