FIPS: An R Package for Biomathematical Modelling of Human Fatigue Related Impairment

Abstract

In many workplace contexts, accurate predictions of a human’s fatigue state can drastically improve system safety. Biomathematical models of fatigue (BMMs) are a family of dynamic phenomenological models that predict the neurobehavioural outcomes of fatigue (e.g., sleepiness, performance impairment) based on sleep/wake history (Dawson, Darwent, & Roach, 2017). However, to-date there are no open source implementations of BMMs, and this presents a significant barrier to their broadscale adoption by researchers and industry practitioners. FIPS is an open source R package (R Core Team, 2020) to facilitate BMM research and simulation. FIPS has implementations of several published bio-mathematical models and includes functions for easily manipulating sleep history data into the required data structures. FIPS also includes default plot and summary methods to aid model interpretation. Model objects follow tidy data conventions (Wickham, 2014), enabling FIPS to be integrated into existing research workflows of R users.