The growing use of SmartCap comes as 'wearable technology' becomes increasingly popular in the retail space, with items like Fitbit allowing users to measure their heart rate, movement and sleep quality. Credit:Fairfax The information is analysed to determine the alertness of the person wearing the cap and relayed to them immediately, as part of efforts to reduce fatigue-related accidents in the workplace. "Most of our customers at the moment are using SmartCaps for vehicle or truck equipment," Dan Bongers, o SmartCap emerged from the co-operative research centre for mining and has been in daily operation on some Australian mine sites for almost three years.

Workers at several major Australian mining companies are regularly having their brains' waves measured throughout the working day. For dump truck drivers at Rio Tinto's coal mines in the Hunter Valley, the SmartCap is used to provide an early warning for when a driver is approaching a microsleep. A small accessory to the SmartCap provides the drivers with a live ranking of their fatigue, and drivers are alerted by sounds when fatigue is rising to dangerous levels. The SmartCap can be used to provide an early warning for when a driver is approaching a microsleep. Each company creates their own rules around how to use the device. At most of Rio's Hunter Valley coal mines, truck drivers have to discuss a fatigue management plan with their supervisor if the SmartCap finds them to be experiencing the highest level of fatigue, which typically comes shortly before a microsleep occurs.

Rival miners like Anglo American and Newcrest Mining have also used SmartCap at some of their operations and more than 1000 of the devices are now in use across Australia, the Americas and parts of Africa. Bongers says feedback from companies using SmartCap has been extremely positive. "The operations around the world that are using SmartCap have, with over a million hours of use, effectively eliminated fatigue incidents from their business," he says. Clear trends have emerged in companies where the device is used on large numbers of staff, and Bongers said those companies were able to adapt working conditions in line with those trends. "As you would expect we see shift workforces most fatigued between 2am to 5am. We are also starting to see patterns based on rosters where we have noticed the first nightshift after a break period is the most difficult to deal with; that transition from day-work to night-work" he says.

"That [information] can be fused with other information, such as positions on the road, to learn about other factors that influence fatigue like road design. Hopefully people with this information can do something about it to prepare better for work." But in an era where collection of personal data is becoming more controversial, Bongers says he can understand why some workers might be uncomfortable about their brain being analysed in the workplace. "The idea of monitoring fatigue for people in the workplace can be a confronting notion at times and I think the comfort that our users feel is that it's an initiative from their workplace to help them get through the day and get home safe each day. It's all about safety," he said. "SmartCap is not recording brainwave information, it is using it to determine a level and then discarding the brainwave information." The growing use of SmartCap comes as "wearable technology" becomes increasingly popular in the retail space, with items like Fitbit allowing users to measure their heart rate, movement and sleep quality.

"People are becoming more comfortable with the notion of wearable technology, and that tends to transfer the discomfort towards what is going to be done with the information," he says. Workers at Rio's Mount Thorley Warkworth mine in New South Wales have recently been urging their bosses to take more notice of SmartCap, and reduce the number of warnings required from SmartCap before action is taken. Staff at other mines have rejected it altogether, with a recent vote at Rio's Hail Creek mine in Queensland rejecting the introduction of SmartCap amid concerns the information gathered may be used for disciplinary reasons. Rio stresses that responses to SmartCap's information were individually tailored between workers and their supervisor.

In a 2014 report on wearable technology, PwC found that 82 per cent of people surveyed were concerned that wearable technology would invade their privacy, but only 40 per cent felt it would take away their autonomy if used in the workplace. "Privacy concerns are inescapable when it comes to the issue of wearable tech. Enterprises will need to be consistently transparent with what they do with data and how they use it. Trust must be at the foundation of the wearable relationship," PwC said in the report. Geoffrey Cann, of Deloitte, says there are more positives than negatives from using wearable technologies like SmartCap in the workplace, so long as they were used within strict and transparent rules. "People should rightly have some concerns regarding what information is being collected about them, but with the right regulatory framework, I can't see why we shouldn't be open to, and embracing, technologies that can improve safety and provide some value to society," he says. "There are often negatives about things that have also huge positives. But that doesn't mean you don't use them. It means you figure out a way to harness the best and minimise the negatives."

SmartCap measures only fatigue and alertness in its current form, but Bongers said it was possible that future versions of the device could measure other types of brain activity, with EEG tests capable of providing 13 different types of information from the brain. While SmartCap came out of the mining sector, Bongers says the company was starting to explore opportunities in other sectors like aviation, oil and gas or healthcare, and sales at retail level may be possible in the near future. "The SmartCap is applicable in any industry where ensuring someone is awake, alert and vigilant is critical to safety or productivity, so planes, trains, buses are the most common uses, but it can work for any situation where you need to make sure a person is alert and on task," Bongers says.