I am looking for subjective scales of fatigue to test my crew members after several hours of flight in order to decide if they can continue to fly or must have a rest to preserve aviation safety. If someone has experience of these scales, I will be interested.
To my knowledge, until now there is no specific scales to evaluate fatigue of crew members.
The most used are the Fatigue Severity Scale (related to last week), and the Samn-Perelli Fatigue Scale. This as only one item and is a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) for immediate perceived values. Higher scores indicate higher levels of fatigue.
To analyze fatigue in crew members don't forget to evaluate also sleepiness. In aviation the most used is also a VAS, the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale.
Thanks a lot for your answer. I used the Samn-Perelli seven-point fatigue scale for a long time but I am not very satisfied with this scale. Some crew members told me that they cheated in order to continue to fly - they know that they must tick at least the 4th level...
I think that a visual analogue scale could be a good alternative and could be very sensitive to small changes.
In my opinion I think the best option could be the 5 or 10 min. PVT or something similar because there they can't lie. With a subjective scale you will have always that problem.
In our study concerning iron deficienca and fatigue (Iron supplementation for unexplained fatigue in non-anaemic women: double blind randomised placebo controlled trial F Verdon, B Burnand, C-L Fallab Stubi, C Bonard, M Graff, A Michaud, T Bischoff, M de Vevey, J-P Studer, L Herzig, C Chapuis, J Tissot, A Pécoud, B Favrat) the VAS was used as self evaluation of fatigue gravity. We used too a valided french questionary with a group of five items for fatigue evaluation ("dimension asthénique") (Pichot P, Brun JP. Questionnaire bref d’auto-évaluation des dimensions dépressive, asthénique et anxieuse. Ann Med Psychol 1984;142:862-5.)
Thank you François for your answer... I will read your article. Among these non-anaemic women, it was a mental or physical unexplained fatigue ? Or both ?
Analyzing subjective fatigue is very hard because patients can cheat... Objective tests would be the good way to analyze the fatigue but it is not very easy to do it in a plane...
Thanks a lot for your contribution to this question !!
we use also the picho scale event if it is difficult to know in whiche extend i is really validated or not
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Chemistry
- Pharmacology
- Pharmaceuticals
- Drugs