Occupational Injuries related to Sleepiness in Indian Traditional Industries

Introduction
The scientist in this article are testing industrial workers from India to find out if the lack

of sleep result in occupational injuries. Scientist already know that having a good sleep is related

to good health. Scientist also know that being sleepy and/or tired affect workers’ performance at

work and during the day. According to Dr. Ajeet Jaiswal research, “sleepiness/fatigue reduces

performance capability induced by slow information processing, increased periods of non-

responding or delayed responding during attention tasks, increased reactions times, reduced

vigilance, reduces accuracy of short-term memory, and accelerated decrements in performance

with time on-tasks.” (Jaiswal, 2012)

Researchers chose this study to see how important sleep is for a worker. This topic has a

lot of relevance to the world due to many people work long hours all time of day and might not

be getting enough rest to be fully functional to carry out their job duties. Scientists did this

research to see if only sleep or sleep related factors are a main cause of occupational injuries.

The information researchers are trying to gather is to find out if loss of sleep, difficulty waking

up in the morning, depression, gender and sleep apnea have contributed to occupational injuries

This topic is of value because everybody in the world works. Knowing the information of

this study benefits society to see if the lack of sleep is dangerous to our health, if our way of

thinking is impaired due to being tired, can we get hurt because of fatigue and how can we

prevent it. The researcher’s hypothesis is to determine how sleep and its factors relate to

workers’ injuries in Indian Traditional Industries.

Materials and Methods

Scientists used workers from small scale enterprises between the ages of 18-65. They

used questionnaires, observations, models, data, and graphs. They used the Center of
Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale to measure depressive symptoms,

questionnaires about the test subjects lives like alcohol consumption, caffeine intake, and

previous work injuries

Results

The results of this study shows that not sleeping enough at night, suffering from

insomnia, and having a hard time waking up in the morning do have a higher chance of suffering

from a work related injury. Night shift workers have a 30-50% more risk of having accidents.

What did surprise the researchers was that sleep deprivation affects men more that women. It

also surprised that many workers that suffer from insomnia are not treated which makes it more

harmfully for the workers.

Discussion

What the results mean is that although the numbers are not high, they are in the middle, it

does show that sleep does go hand in hand with occupational injuries. Some of the researcher’s

hypothesis was proved. When it came to the question if difficult waking up was related to work

injuries scientist need more research. This question was inconclusive because the researcher

suggests that not being able to wake up in the morning would cause work injuries early in the

shift or even on the way to work. The researcher was able to gather enough data to conclude that

poor night sleep does have an impact on the safety of workers. They also concluded that if

workers took a 15-20 minute nap during a break or lunch break would help and have less

chances of injuries at work.

The limitations of this study are that it did not identify direct relationships and the record

of injuries were self-reported. Also there were some factors that were left out like regular

exercise routines and how many hours a person works. It would have been helpful if they would
have added some of these factors left out also if the scientist would have done more

experimentations instead of just questionnaires.

 Bibliography
Jaiswal, A. (2012). Work Cited. Occupational Injuries related to Sleepiness in Indian
Traditional Industries, 248-267.