A Synthesis of Subjective Scales Which Assess Worker Fatigue: Building a Simple, Reliable, and Effective Evaluative Instrument

The accurate assessment of operator fatigue has bedeviled ergonomics since before the field was formally constituted. From the archives of the British Industrial Fatigue Research Board in the pre-World-War I era, to Muscio’s (1921) famous inquiry “is a fatigue test possible?’ [1], the question of assessment has been a perpetual challenge. The lack of accurate assessment is allied to a ready recognition that fatigue plays a critical role in many large-scale disasters as well as errors and incidents of less social prominence, but which are nevertheless equally problematic. In recent decades, in our 24-7-365 world, the issue of operator fatigue continues to impact multiple millions of workers around the world;a propensity that the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated. Yet all is not doom and gloom. Most especially in the 21st century, a number of promising methods and techniques have been offered to provide reliable, quantitative values which specify fatigue levels. Very much like the allied concern for workload assessment [2], the three primary methods of assessment concern primary task performance, physiological assessment approaches, and subjective evaluations. The present work is focused on the latter mode, being arguably the most useful for the prospective projection of future fatigue levels. In short, the issue of fatigue is a large and growing one, its assessment is a crucial ergonomic concern, synthesized subjective assessment techniques promise to provide a vital answer. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.