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This SAE Information Report provides definitions and discussions of key terms concerning driver drowsiness and fatigue, and basic information on measuring drowsiness and fatigue. It also includes information and concepts for driver drowsiness as they relate to the safe operation of a vehicle. The key driver drowsiness and fatigue causal factors include the following: (1) sleep quality and quantity, (2) time of day, (3) time awake, (4) time on task (modulated by characteristics of the driving task), (5) task-related fatigue (variations of arousal levels related to task underload and overload), and (6) combinations of these factors. Medical conditions, medication, alcohol, or drugs exacerbate drowsiness; however, the discussion in this report is limited to fatigue concepts.

This Information Report provides functional definitions and discussions of key terms and concepts for relating the experimental evaluation of driver distraction to real-world crash involvement. Examples of driver distraction and driving performance metrics include those related to vehicle control, object and event detection and response (OEDR), physiological indicators, subjective assessments, or combinations thereof. Examples of real-world crash involvement metrics include the epidemiological effect size measures of risk ratio, rate ratio, and odds ratio. The terms and concepts defined in this document are not intended to contribute to methodologies for assessing the individual metrics within a domain; these are covered in other SAE documents (e.g., SAE J2944) and SAE technical reports. For any measure chosen in one domain or the other, the goal is to give general definitions of key terms and concepts that relate metrics in one domain to those in the other.