Journal articles on the topic 'Mental fatigue; Radar operators'

Haul dumptruck is a heavy-duty vehicles which is used to haul the overburden from loading point to disposal area. Haul dumptruck is driven by operators who have a high enough workload risk, especially on mental activity. The purpose of this study was to learn the correlation between mental workload with fatigue complaints of PT. MKP haul dumptruck operators at PKP2B PT. Mandiri Intiperkasa Site Krassi, Tarakan, Kalimantan Utara. This research was an analytic observational research with cross sectional design. The Sample of this research was 110 PT. MKP haul dumptruck operators at PKP2B PT. Mandiri Intiperkasa Site Krassi. The Variables of this research were individual factors (age, gender, and years of service), mental workload, and fatigue complaints. The data were analyzed by spearman correlation test to analyze the correlation between variables. The results showed 50% of haul dumptruck operators were 35-44 years old, 100% male, and 32.7% had 7-10 years of service. Most of haul dumptruck operators (58.2%) had very high mental workload levels and 68.2% was having low-grade fatigue complaints. The significant ρ value of the spearman test between mental workload and fatigue complaints was 0,400, while the correlation coefficient value was -0,081. The conclusion of this reasearch indicated that there was not a significant correlation between mental workload and fatigue complaints on haul dumptruck operators. Recommendation for the company are forming a labor unions, fixing cottage rest areas, giving co-worker when haul dumptruck operators complain of fatigue and mental workload on high level, and maintainin-developing a fatigue management as well as raising workers' awareness on its application.

Purpose This paper aims to investigate an approach for mental fatigue detection and estimation of assembly operators in the manual assembly process of complex products, with the purpose of founding the basis for adaptive transfer and demonstration of assembly process information (API), and eventually making the manual assembly process smarter and more human-friendly. Design/methodology/approach The proposed approach detects and estimates the mental state of assembly operators by electroencephalography (EEG) signal recording and analysis in an engine assembly experiment. When the subjects perform assembly tasks, their EEG signal is recorded by a portable EEG recording system called Emotiv EPOC+ headset. The feature set of the EEG signal is then extracted by calculating its power spectrum density (PSD), followed by data dimension reduction based on principal component analysis (PCA). The dimension-reduced data are classified by using support vector machines (SVMs), and hence, the mental state of assembly operators can be estimated during the assembly process. Findings The experimental result shows that the proposed approach is able to estimate the mental state of assembly operators within an acceptable accuracy range, and the PCA-based dimension reduction method performs very well by representing the high-dimensional EEG feature set with just a few principal components. Originality/value This paper provides theoretical and experimental basis for the API transfer and demonstration based on human cognition. It provides a new idea to seek balance between the improvement of production efficiency and the sustainable utilization of human resources.

A team Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) approach has been applied to the modernization of a radar operations system. With the remoting and automation of radar operations, there will be dramatic changes in the number and role of operators, as well as the displays required to support operators during missions. To design the new modernized system it is necessary to obtain a full understanding of how the current system operates and ensure that the allocation of tasks to humans and automation fully covers the entire operation. Traditional task analysis does not take into consideration plans for staffing reduction and addition of the new team “member” or agent, i.e., the automated system. To facilitate operator interaction with the modernized system, a new team architecture must be considered. CTA documents current operations, including a representation of mental activities, e.g., assessments, judgements, and decisions, in addition to the physical actions, e.g., executing system commands. A team CTA method is used to model the operations independent of the current operator roles and team structure. This approach captures the element of “team” by assuming a meta-operator and representing parallel tasking and data flow among tasks. This paper provides a description of the team CTA method and its application to large-scale, complex system design.

Summary The aim was to study the effect of radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation (EMR) on stress indices, health complaints and fatigue of operators working fast-rotating extended shifts. Working conditions, job content, job control, social support, health complaints and fatigue were followed in 220 operators, 110 exposed to EMR and 110 control operators, matched by age and sex. The EMR was measured and time-weighted average (TWA) was calculated. The excretion rates of stress hormones cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline were followed during the extended shifts in 36 operators, working at different levels of exposure and 24-hour exposure was calculated. The exposed group pointed more problems with the working conditions, including EMR, noise, currents and risk of accidents, more health complaints and higher level of fatigue. The most common health complaints were mental and physical exhaustion after work, pains in the chest, musculoskeletal complaints, headache, and apathy. High level EMR exposure (TWAmean = 3.10 μW/cm2, TWAmax = 137.00 μW/cm2) significantly increased the 24-hour excretion of cortisol and noradrenaline, whereas the increase of adrenaline excretion did not reach significance, as well as hormone excretion rates under low level exposure (TWAmean = 1.89 μW/cm2, TWAmax = 5.24 μW/cm2). In conclusion, higher number of health complaints, higher stress hormone excretion rates and fatigue were found in operators under EMR.

Bus operators are exposed to many occupational hazards, ranging from workplace violence to air pollution to biohazards. Through a summer project, Occupational Health Internship Program students explored bus operators’ health and safety concerns at the Amalgamated Transit Union Local #265 in San Jose, CA. Pilot surveys and individual interviews were used to identify operators’ perspectives on split shifts. A majority of a small sample of 109 bus operators reported dissatisfaction with split shifts, experience with physical and mental fatigue, stress from working these shifts, and inability to focus on immediate tasks due to working split shifts. Some operators preferred split shifts for various reasons, including having time to perform errands, eat lunch, and rest. Operators’ suggestions to improve route scheduling include split shift observations by management, upward communication with senior management, and improvement of bus yard and relief point facilities where operators take their breaks between shifts.

The performance of volunteers-operators of duty shifts, subjected to increased mental and psycho-emotional loads during prolonged operator’s performance using a caffeine-containing complex (chewing gum) has been studied. It has been revealed that in performing their duty shifts under fatigue conditions (a state of monotony), the use of a caffeine-containing complex can lead to a slight improvement in the subjective status against the background of a decrease in the vegetative parameters values of the cardiovascular system (tone of peripheral vessels) (2 tables, bibliography: 8 refs).

The high fatality rate in oil and gas extraction (OGE) is a growing concern within the industry. OGE workers are exposed to long work hours, intense mental and physical workload, coupled with changing shift patterns, which can lead to elevated fatigue levels. The aim of this study was to explore the effect of shiftwork on heart rate variability indicators of workload and fatigue using wearable monitors in offshore operations. Ten male operators (age: 31.3 (6.1) years; stature: 1.72 (0.1) m; weight: 85.24 (9.8) kg) were monitored throughout their daily shifts for six days on an offshore drillship using physiological sensors. Heart rate variability (HRV) was measured in the frequency (ratio of low to high frequency; LF/HF) and temporal (root mean square of successive differences; RMSSD) domains. Six of the ten operators underwent swing shifts in the middle of the data collection period. There was a main effect of shift time on HRV parameters (i.e., operators on night shift were in a more fatigued state), and a main effect of swing shift on LF/HF (i.e., when swing shift occurred, those operators were more fatigued). Findings suggest that physiological profiles differ based on shift time and swing shifts, and that swing shifts for night shift workers adversely affect heart rate variability responses.

Operator have considerable contribution in the operation of the system trough its role in the completion of their work. Therefore it is important to know the operator’s reliability (human reliability). The levels of human reliability is determined by calculating the potential in making mistakes, known as human error. Human error is influenced by the inadequate system design, the working bad situation, the high complexity of the work, the characteristics of human behaviour, the mental and physical fatigue, the working environment and organizational policies. The main objective of this study was to analyze the reliability of the human operators to control the occurance of human error. This study was an observational with cross-sectional approach. The study was conducted on 14 of operators maintenance machine in PT. Tjokro Putraperkasa. Data were collected by means of interview and observation. Data were obtained using Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) and Standardized Plant Analysis Risk Human Reliability Assessment (SPAR-H). The result showed that most (80%) of the operators did not wear Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), possible were widely found in preventive maintenance machine bubut, the high score (HEP= 0,0477) of human unreliability was found in operators working intruction in machine bubut, hobbing and CNC, as whole the system reliability was still low, and the majority (80%) of operators were still unreliable in doing their job.Keywords:human error, human reliability, SPAR-H.

A kinematic controller is described that improves the ergonomics of excavator (backhoe) operation, thus increasing work rates and reducing operator fatigue At present, operators have direct control over hydraulic ram velocities, and must synchronize these to achieve the desired motion of the bucket; this requires considerable mental dexterity. Kinematic algorithms are described that give the operator control over bucket velocity in an ergonomically effective coordinate frame. In this way, the synchronization task is performed by the controller rather than by the operator. The results of a simulation study are reported and conclusions are drawn.

40 male subjects, ages 18 to 40 yr., practiced tracking a moving target by manipulating a viscous-damped tracking device using two band grips. Eight subjects were assigned to each of five training groups. Four shortened training schedules that were considered as representing massed, distributed, or a combination of massed and distributed trials were compared with a four-day training schedule which had been previously used. Total practice time was the same for all groups. The subjects tracked a target which was moving in a fixed arc at a constant angular velocity of 5 mrad/sec. Horizontal standard deviation ( SD) errors were recorded. Analysis showed significant differences in performance among the groups on a subsequent test day; however, one of the massed/distributed schedules visually showed less variability. Comparison of subjective estimates of “Mental Fatigue” and “Eye Fatigue” among the groups were almost the same. The results are discussed in terms of the schedules most likely to produce stable performance by operators.

Kelelahan merupakan salah satu faktor penyebab kecelakaan transportasi, ditandai dengan menurunnya kinerja fisik dan mental yang mengakibatkan kurangnya kewaspadaan karena rasa kantuk. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui faktor risiko dan faktor pendukung kelelahan pada operator alat berat. Penelitian dilakukan pada operator alat berat di 3 tambang batubara di Kalimantan (2 area di Kalimantan Timur dan 1 area di Kalimantan Selatan), melibatkan 353 operator alat berat yang bekerja dengan 3 sif. Hasilnya menunjukkan bahwa keluhan kelelahan semakin tinggi dengan meningkatnya usia, lama kerja, dan kerja pada sif 3 (malam hari). Kelelahan paling banyak dirasakan oleh operator dump truck (bagian hauling) yang dipengaruhi oleh faktor-faktor pekerjaan (postur saat bekerja, faktor variasi pekerjaan, beban kerja dan vigilance) dan faktor-faktor bukan pekerjaan (kondisi medan atau area tambang yang berisiko, penerangan yang kurang pada malam hari, dan rute yang selalu berubah). Faktor lainnya berkaitan dengan masalah sosial-psikologis, baik yang berhubungan dengan pekerjaan maupun lingkungan kerja, seperti waktu istirahat, standar gaji yang belum memadai, pengaturan jadwal cuti yang sering tidak jelas, dan masalah karier. Disimpulkan, secara umum kelelahan meningkat dengan bertambahnya usia dan lama kerja, dengan kelelahan yang lebih besar pada pekerja sif 3. Umumnya, penurunan waktu reaksi pekerja sif malam lebih besar daripada waktu reaksi pekerja sif siang.Fatigue is one of the causes of transportation accidents, characterized by reduced physical and mental performance resulting in reduced alertness due to drowsiness. The present study was to determine the risk factors and contributing factors of fatigue suffered by heavy equipment operators. The study was conducted at three coal mining sites in Kalimantan (2 areas in East Kalimantan and 1 area in South Kalimantan) involving 353 heavy equipment operators who work in shifts. It was found that fatigue complaint is higher by older age, longer work, and work at shift 3 (night time). The fatigue is mostly complained by dump truck (hauling part) operators which was influenced by work-related factors (work posture, job variety, workload, vigilance) and non-work related factors (terrain or mine risk area, lack of lighting at night, and route track which is always changed). Another factors related with socio-psychological factors, either related with job or working environment, such as adequacy of rest time, remuneration system, leave system, and insecure career. It is concluded that in general the fatigues were increased as the worker ages were older and longer duration of work, with higher fatigues were suffered at shift 3. Generally, reduced reaction time among shift 3 workers is higher than that those of daytime shift.

Cognitive workload, being a quantitative measure of mental effort, draws significant interest of researchers, as it allows to monitor the state of mental fatigue. Estimation of cognitive workload becomes especially important for job positions requiring outstanding engagement and responsibility, e.g., air-traffic dispatchers, pilots, car or train drivers. Cognitive workload estimation finds its applications also in the field of education material preparation. It allows to monitor the difficulty degree for specific tasks enabling to adjust the level of education materials to typical abilities of students. In this study, we present the results of research conducted with the goal of examining the influence of various fuzzy or non-fuzzy aggregation functions upon the quality of cognitive workload estimation. Various classic machine learning models were successfully applied to the problem. The results of extensive in-depth experiments with over 2000 aggregation operators shows the applicability of the approach based on the aggregation functions. Moreover, the approach based on aggregation process allows for further improvement of classification results. A wide range of aggregation functions is considered and the results suggest that the combination of classical machine learning models and aggregation methods allows to achieve high quality of cognitive workload level recognition preserving low computational cost.

Implementing high degree automation in future air traffic control (ATC) systems will be crucial for coping with increased air traffic demand and maintaining safety. However, issues associated with the passive monitoring role assumed by operators in these systems continue to be of concern. Passive monitoring can lead to a range of human operator performance problems when overseeing automation. The performance cost when human operators are placed in a passive monitoring role has been conceptualized as the out-of-the-loop (OOTL) performance problem: where adding more automation to a system makes it less likely that the operator will notice an automation failure and intervene appropriately (Endsley & Kiris, 1995). The OOTL performance problem has been attributed to numerous factors including vigilance decrements, fatigue, task disengagement, and poor situation awareness. This study tested two different approaches to addressing the OOTL performance problem associated with high degree automation in a simulation of en-route ATC (ATC-labAdvanced; Fothergill, Loft, & Neal, 2009). Following a 60-min training and practice session, 115 university student participants completed two 30-min ATC scenarios; one under manual control and one where they supervised high degree automation (counterbalanced order). The automation performed all acceptances for aircraft entering the sector of controlled airspace, handed off all departing aircraft, and resolved all conflicts between aircraft pairs that would otherwise have violated the minimum safe separation standards (except for a single automation failure event). Participants were instructed that the automation was highly reliable, but not infallible. The first aim was to confirm that while high degree automation can reduce workload, it can also lead to increased task disengagement and fatigue when compared to manual control. Furthermore, to determine how well participants supervised the automation, the conflict detection automation failed once late in the automation scenario. This failure involved two aircraft violating the minimum lateral and vertical separation standard and being missed by the automation. We expected to find that participants would fail to detect this conflict more often, or be slower to detect it, when under automation conditions, compared to a comparable conflict event presented when under manual control. Our second aim was to investigate whether these costs of automation could be ameliorated by techniques designed to improve task engagement. Participants were assigned to one of three automation conditions, including automation with (1) no acknowledgements, (2) acknowledgments, or (3) queries. In the no acknowledgements condition, automation failure monitoring was the only task performed. In the acknowledgements condition, similar to Pop et al. (2012), participants were additionally instructed to click to acknowledge each automated action, thereby potentially improving engagement by adding an active component to an otherwise passive monitoring task. In the queries condition, participants were queried regarding the past, present, and future state of aircraft on the display. The goal was to help participants maintain an accurate mental model (aka. situation awareness) when using automation. We found that automation reduced workload, increased disengagement and fatigue, and impaired detection of a single conflict detection failure event compared to manual task performance. Consistent with previous research, this shows that as a higher degree of automation is added to a system, it becomes less likely that the operator will notice automation failures and intervene appropriately (e.g. Pop et al., 2012). The first intervention tested whether adding automation acknowledgement requirements to the task made it easier for participants to detect and resolve a single automation failure event. The results showed that there was no difference between automation with and without acknowledgement requirements on workload, task disengagement, fatigue, and the detection of the automation failure event. The second intervention tested whether adding queries regarding aircraft on the display would improve failure detection performance. The queries intervention successfully reduced task disengagement and trended towards reducing fatigue, while workload was maintained at a level similar to that of manual control. These findings suggest that the manipulation successfully reduced some of the subjective deficits associated with the passive monitoring of automation. However, there was a significant cost to participants’ ability to detect and resolve the automation failure event relative to manual performance, where half the participants in the queries condition missed the automation failure entirely, compared to 25% in the no queries condition. Response times to detect the failure event were also considerably longer when queries were included compared to no queries. One explanation is that the queries condition may have been engaging to the point of distraction. This is supported by qualitative information provided by participants, where 40% mentioned that they found the queries to be distracting. Future studies may wish to examine the effectiveness of auditory queries instead of visual queries, potentially with verbal instead of typed responses. This may allow queries to reduce task disengagement and fatigue while potentially improving participants’ ability to intervene to automation failures.

Abstract Air traffic controllers simultaneously develop complex and multiple tasks in the course of their activities. In this context, concern is raised over the high level of attention needed by these professionals which can ultimately be affected by stress and fatigue. Objectives: The objective of this study was to assess attention level in air traffic controllers (ATCo). Methods: 45 flight protection professionals were evaluated, comprising 30 ATCo, subdivided into ATCo with ten or more years in the profession (ATCo³10, n=15) and ATCo with less than ten years in the profession (ATCo <10, n=15) and 15 aeronautical information services operators (AIS), subdivided into AIS with ten years or more in the profession (AIS³10, n=8) and AIS with less than ten years in the profession (AIS <10, n=7), who were included as the control group. The digit symbol, d2 (the individual marks the letter d on a specific form containing 14 lines with 47 letters in each, maintaining focus on letter d followed by two dashes), forward digit span, backward digit span and PASAT (paced auditory serial addition test) attention tests were used. Kruskal-Wallis was used and data expressed as Median (Minimum and Maximum) with p<0.05. Results: The ATCo³10 presented greater focus of attention, sustained attention, mental manipulation and resistance to interference capacity compared to the AIS³10. Comparison of ATCo³10 to the AIS<10 showed they presented only greater resistance to interference, and when compared to the ATCo<10 presented lower focus. Conclusions: The air traffic control activity after ten years may be associated with a high level of attention.

The aim of the study was to assess the functional state of the autonomic nervous and cardiovascular systems of workers employed at the thermoshaft oil production. material and methods. Our test group No. 1 was consisted of operators dealing with blowing of wells. Their average age accounted of 30.5 ± 5.1 years; average underground experience amounted to 6.5 ± 2.7 years. Our test group No. 2 included 20 workers who performed their working tasks only on the surface but who had had the underground experience in the past. Their average age was 39.8±6.4 years (p>0.05); average surface experience amounted to 6.4±3.1 years (p>0.05), underground experience - 7.9±2.3 years (p>0.05). Our reference group consisted of 23 office workers never exposed to any adverse occupational factors. Their average age was 31.3±4.6 (p>0.05); average working experience amounted to 6.5±3.4 years (p>0.05). Our research analyzed non-occupational and occupational risk factors, neurophysiologic testing, the examination of vegetative functions, and statistic data processing. Results. 88% of workers in the test group No. 1 had “vegetative” complaints, whereas only 13% had apparent symptoms related to such disorders. Clinical examinations revealed vegetative dysfunction signs in 100% workers in the test group No. 1; in 62% workers in the test group No. 2 (t>2, p<0.05,χ2=10.1); and only in 29% workers in the reference group (t>2, p<0.05, χ2=23.9). Neurophysiologic testing allowed revealing workers from the test group No.1 to show attention decrement and an increase in the speed of mental responses by the end of their work shift. 24% had increased blood pressure, both systolic (up to 152.3±8.4 mm Hg) and diastolic one (up to 87.4±13.7 mm Hg). The absolute risk for workers from the test group No. 1 amounted to 0.8 as per detected functional disorders. It amounted to only 0.2 for workers never exposed to adverse occupational factors. Conclusion. Occupational activities performed by workers employed at thermoshaft oil production result in chronic fatigue. Neuropsychological and physical overloads lead to a decline in adaptation reserves of a body, vegetative disorders, and vascular tone dysfunction, which may be the arterial hypertension predictor.

Метою статті є з’ясування особливостей соціально-психологічного забезпечення життєдіяльності жінок в умовах динамічних соціотехнічних систем управління. Методи. За допомогою методів анкетування та структурного моделювання, оцінювання напру-женості психологічних функцій (тест М. Люшера, cоціометрія, увага, мислення, частота серцевих скорочень, тремор, динамометрія) виявлено зміну стомлення, що зростає, під час роботи досліджуваних в умовах динамічних соціотехнічних систем діяльності. Обстежено 500 досліджуваних (оператори, фахівці) у віці від 18 до 46 років (усі жінки) у динамічних автоматизованих системах управління. Як оптимізуючий метод використано довільну психічну саморегуляцію життєдіяльності. Виявлено та скореговано негативні функціональні стани жінок шляхом оволодіння ними навичками саморегуляції (аутотренінг, ідеомоторне тренування). Програма містила вправи-розминки, тренінгові вправи, дискусії, міні-лекції, роботу в парах і малих групах. Опановувалися м’язова релаксація, самонавіювання, активація рефлексивної зони свідомості. Результати. Схарактеризовано соціально-психологічні особливості взаємодії та взаємовпливу компонентів динамічних соціотехнічних систем діяльності. Здійснено психологічний аналіз тен-денцій розвитку таких систем. В емпіричному дослідженні визначено особливості забезпечення життєдіяльності жінок на робочих місцях. Розроблено й апробовано концепцію соціальної підтримки їхньої життєдіяльності. Спрогнозовано роботоздатність жінок і можливі зміни їхнього функціонального стану. Здійснено обґрунтування соціально-психологічного забезпечення розвитку соціотехнічних систем діяльності, яке допоможе подолати негативні наслідки функціонування таких систем і зумовить їх подальший розвиток за нових (ринкових) умов. Перспектива продовження дослідження вбачається в розробленні психологічної теорії оптимізації процесу діяльності жінок у динамічних соціотехнічних системах. Висновки. Проведена дослідницька робота щодо вивчення особливостей життєдіяльності й роботоздатності жінок у динамічних соціотехнічних системах, виявлення прояву їхнього функ-ціонального стану. Розроблено та апробовано структурно-функціональну модель соціально-психо-логічного забезпечення життєдіяльності жінок стосовно наявних стадій діяльності в динамічних соціотехнічних системах. Ключові слова: система, автоматизована діяльність, неперервна інформація, користувачі, психологічна готовність. The purpose of the article is to clarify the features of socio-psychological support of women's lives in a dynamic socio-technical management systems.Methods. Using methods of questionnaires and structural modeling, assessment of psychological and functional stress (M. Luscher test, sociometry, attention, thinking, heart rate, tremor, dynamometry) revealed a change in increasing fatigue in the study of dynamic sociotechnical systems. 500 subjects (operators, specialists) aged 18 to 46 years (all women) in dynamic automated control systems were examined. Arbitrary mental self-regulation of vital activity is used as an optimizing method. Negative functional states of women, tasks by mastering their skills of self-regulation (autotraining, ideomotor training) are revealed and corrected. The program included warm-up exercises, training exercises, discussions, mini-lectures, work in pairs and small groups. Muscle relaxation, self-suggestion, activation of the reflex zone of consciousness were mastered.Results. Socio-psychological features of interaction and mutual influence of components of dynamic sociotechnical systems of activity are characterized. The psychological analysis of tendencies of development of such systems is carried out. The empirical study identified the features of women's livelihoods in the workplace. The concept of social support of their vital activity is developed and tested. The working capacity of women is predicted, and changes in their functional state are possible. The substantiation of social and psychological support of development of sociotechnical systems of activity which will help to overcome negative consequences of functioning of such systems and will lead to their further development under new (market) conditions is carried out.The prospect of continuing the study is seen in the development of psychological theory for optimizing the process of women's activities in dynamic socio-technical systems.Conclusions. Research work has been carried out to study the peculiarities of life and work capacity of women in dynamic socio-technical systems, to identify the manifestation of their functional state. A structural and functional model of social and psychological support of women's life in relation to the existing stages of activity in dynamic socio-technical systems has been developed and tested.Key words: system, automated activity, continuous information, users, psychological readiness

Assessment of mental workload is crucial for applications that require sustained attention and where conditions such as mental fatigue and drowsiness must be avoided. Previous work that attempted to devise objective methods to model mental workload were mainly based on neurological or physiological data collected when the participants performed tasks that did not involve physical activity. While such models may be useful for scenarios that involve static operators, they may not apply in real-world situations where operators are performing tasks under varying levels of physical activity, such as those faced by first responders, firefighters, and police officers. Here, we describe WAUC, a multimodal database of mental Workload Assessment Under physical aCtivity. The study involved 48 participants who performed the NASA Revised Multi-Attribute Task Battery II under three different activity level conditions. Physical activity was manipulated by changing the speed of a stationary bike or a treadmill. During data collection, six neural and physiological modalities were recorded, namely: electroencephalography, electrocardiography, breathing rate, skin temperature, galvanic skin response, and blood volume pulse, in addition to 3-axis accelerometry. Moreover, participants were asked to answer the NASA Task Load Index questionnaire after each experimental section, as well as rate their physical fatigue level on the Borg fatigue scale. In order to bring our experimental setup closer to real-world situations, all signals were monitored using wearable, off-the-shelf devices. In this paper, we describe the adopted experimental protocol, as well as validate the subjective, neural, and physiological data collected. The WAUC database, including the raw data and features, subjective ratings, and scripts to reproduce the experiments reported herein will be made available at: http://musaelab.ca/resources/.

The use of modern multi-functional forestry machines has already been associated with central nervous system fatigue induced by high mental workload. As these machines are being used under increasingly difficult terrain conditions, further knowledge is required on the expected aggravation of operators’ mental workload, so that suitable work/rest schedules can be developed. Within such a context, the aim of this study was to gauge aggravations of mental workload derived from increasing slope gradient. Measurements of eye activity were obtained from a representative harvester operator working in corridors with the following mean inclinations: 9%, 23% and 47%. The duration, frequency and trajectory of eye movements were used to determine the harvester operator’s mental workload, on the assumption that worsening work conditions would be reflected by increased eyeball activity. The number of fixations during the performance of all tasks increased with the increasing slope gradient. Similarly, fixation duration increased with slope gradient. The mean duration of saccades when working on a 23% slope was 5% shorter compared to work under a 9% gradient. A further significant shortening of saccade duration (~22%) occurred when working on a 47% slope. The good match between eye activity cycles and work cycles, visible especially on steep slopes, indicates that mental workload is related to work conditions. Overall, operating a forest harvester on steep slopes results in a greatly increased mental workload and calls for suitable rest schedules.

Objective This study examined whether professional air traffic controllers (ATCos) were subject to peak-end effects in reporting their mental workload after performing an air traffic control task, and in predicting their mental workload in future scenarios. Background In affective experience studies, people’s evaluation of a period of experience is strongly influenced by the most intense (peak) point and the endpoint. However, whether the effects exist in mental workload evaluations made by professional operators is still not known. Method In Study 1, 20 ATCos performed air traffic control scenarios on high-fidelity radar simulators and reported their mental workload. We used a 2 (high peak, low peak) × 2 (high end, low end) within-subject design. In Study 2, another group of 43 ATCos completed a survey asking them to predict their mental workload given the same air traffic control scenarios. Results In Study 1, ATCos reported higher mental workload after completing the high-peak and the high-end scenarios. In contrast, in Study 2, ATCos predicted the peak workload effect but not the end workload effect when asked to predict their experience in dealing with the same scenarios. Conclusion Peak and end effects exist in subjective mental workload evaluation, but experts only had meta-cognitive awareness of the peak effect, and not the end effect. Application Researchers and practitioners that use subjective workload estimates for work design decisions need to be aware of the potential impact of peak and end task demand effects on subjective mental workload ratings provided by expert operators.

AbstractMicrowave generating equipment first became common during World War 2 with the development of radar. Soviet bloc countries reported that individuals exposed to microwaves frequently developed headaches, fatigue, loss of appetite, sleepiness, difficulty in concentration, poor memory, emotional instability, and labile cardiovascular function, and established stringent exposure standards. For a variety of reasons these reports were discounted in Western countries, where the prevailing belief was that there could be no adverse health effects of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) that were not mediated by tissue heating. The reported Soviet effects were at lower intensities than those that cause heating. However, there were several accidental exposures of radar operators in Western countries that resulted in persistent symptoms similar to those described above. The Soviets irradiated the US Embassy in Moscow with microwaves during the period 1953–1975, and while no convincing evidence of elevated cancer rates was reported, there were reports of “microwave illness”. Officials passed these complaints off as being due to anxiety, not effects of the microwave exposure. There is increasing evidence that the “microwave syndrome” or “electro-hypersensitivity” (EHS) is a real disease that is caused by exposure to EMFs, especially those in the microwave range. The reported incidence of the syndrome is increasing along with increasing exposure to EMFs from electricity, WiFi, mobile phones and towers, smart meters and many other wireless devices. Why some individuals are more sensitive is unclear. While most individuals who report having EHS do not have a specific history of an acute exposure, excessive exposure to EMFs, even for a brief period of time, can induce the syndrome.

The current study investigated the associations between female perceived fatigue of elite soccer players and their sleep, and the associations between the sleep of players and soccer games. The sample included 29 female elite soccer players from the Norwegian national soccer team with a mean age of ~26 years. Perceived fatigue and sleep were monitored over a period of 124 consecutive days. In this period, 12.8 ± 3.9 soccer games per player took place. Sleep was monitored with an unobtrusive impulse radio ultra-wideband Doppler radar (Somnofy). Perceived fatigue was based on a self-report mobile phone application that detected daily experienced fatigue. Multilevel analyses of day-to-day associations showed that, first, increased perceived fatigue was associated with increased time in bed (3.6 ± 1.8 min, p = 0.037) and deep sleep (1.2 ± 0.6 min, p = 0.007). Increased rapid eye movement (REM) sleep was associated with subsequently decreased perceived fatigue (−0.21 ± 0.08 arbitrary units [AU], p = 0.008), and increased respiration rate in non-REM sleep was associated with subsequently increased fatigue (0.27 ± 0.09 AU, p = 0.002). Second, game night was associated with reduced time in bed (−1.0 h ± 8.4 min, p = &lt;0.001), total sleep time (−55.2 ± 6.6 min, p = &lt;0.001), time in sleep stages (light: −27.0 ± 5.4 min, p = &lt;0.001; deep: −3.6 ± 1.2 min, p = 0.001; REM: −21.0 ± 3.0 min, p = &lt;0.001), longer sleep-onset latency (3.0 ± 1.2 min, p = 0.013), and increased respiration rate in non-REM sleep (0.32 ± 0.08 respirations per min, p = &lt;0.001), compared to the night before the game. The present findings show that deep and REM sleep and respiration rate in non-REM sleep are the key indicators of perceived fatigue in female elite soccer players. Moreover, sleep is disrupted during game night, likely due to the high physical and mental loads experienced during soccer games. Sleep normalizes during the first and second night after soccer games, likely preventing further negative performance-related consequences.

Underground coal mine operation should avoid overtime or continuous working hours too long, otherwise easy to increase fatigue, increase the physiological and psychological burden of operators, resulting in accidents. How to prevent operator fatigue and unsafe behavior is the focus of current research in the industry and academia. It is an effective means to reduce physical and mental injury and accident rate caused by bad working environment to pump station drivers through reasonable arrangement of working time. In this study, the field measured physiological index data of a mine face pump station driver in Henan province, China were taken as an example, and the sensitive physiological indexes such as systolic pressure, diastolic pressure and heart rate of the underground pump station driver were calculated by using the grey predictive model GM (1,1). The warning range of each index was determined, and the safe working hours of the pump station driver was predicted. The results show that, according to the principle of minimum value triggered by threshold value of physiological indexes, the reasonable safe working hours of pump station drivers in fully mechanized mining face is 5.7 hours. The conclusion shows that the quantitative study of safe working hours provides a reference for the reasonable arrangement of working time and has a certain guiding significance for the reduction of human error and safe production.

Abstract Impaired workers, unable to practice their activities with effective skills and adequate safety protection because of physical or mental illness, alcohol and drug addiction, inappropriate behaviour as a consequence of fatigue, sleepiness, or distress, may be hazardous for colleagues and customers. To properly manage these workers, public health must resolve the ethical dilemma arising from the legitimate interests of all stakeholders. The sick worker's interests include career expectations, role in organization, right to privacy, and right to freedom from discrimination. The customer's interests include protection from harm, right to autonomy, and right to informed choice. The society's interests include maintaining effective and affordable public services, as well as the benefits and burdens of any policies. Traditional ethics, oriented toward the individual relationship, failed to find an uncontroversial solution to these complex issues. Our research pointed to the organisation level. The La.R.A. Study group on Hazardous Workers was set up in 1999 in Italy, to study how to protect the health and safety of impaired workers and that of third parties, without prejudice to the civil rights of workers. The group includes many subject matter experts like: doctors from different specialties, jurists, bioethicists, employees' and employers' representatives. It is independent and not financed. The ethical, legal and operational aspects of each specific problem are discussed from different points of view and at the end a consensus document containing the practical indications for the prevention operators is produced. Over the years, Lara has produced 10 consensus documents on specific problems and has stimulated companies to develop policies for hazardous workers, preferably according to a bottom-up participatory model. The collective definition of methods and solutions allows management of hazardous workers. Key messages Disability management is preferable to exclusion from work. A shared company policy is the basic principle of management of hazardous workers.

Setting the Mood Weirdly, everything feels the same. There’s absolutely no distinction for me between news, work, walking, gaming, Netflix, rock collecting, scrolling, messaging. I don’t know how this happened, but everything has simply blurred together. There’s a dreadful and yet soothing sameness to it, scrolling through images on Instagram, scrolling Netflix, walking the dog, scrolling the news, time scrolling by as I watch face after face appear or disappear on my screen, all saying something, yet saying nothing. Is this the rhythm of crisis in a slow apocalypse? Really, would it be possible for humans to just bore themselves into oblivion? Because in the middle of a pandemic, boredom feels in my body the same as doom ... just another swell that passes, like my chest as it rises and falls with my breath. This opening anecdote comes from combining narratives in two studies we conducted online during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: a global study, Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking: Autoethnographic Accounts of Lived Experience in Times of Global Trauma; and an Australian project, The Shut-In Worker: Working from Home and Digitally-Enabled Labour Practices. The Shut-In Worker project aimed to investigate the thoughts, beliefs, and experiences of Australian knowledge workers working from home during lockdown. From June to October 2020, we recruited twelve households across two Australian states. While the sample included households with diverse incomes and living arrangements—from metropolitan single person apartment dwellers to regional families in free standing households—the majority were relatively privileged. The households included in this study were predominantly Anglo-Australian and highly educated. Critically, unlike many during COVID-19, these householders had maintained their salaried work. Participating households took part in an initial interview via Zoom or Microsoft Teams during which they took us on workplace tours, showing us where and how the domestic had been requisitioned for salaried labour. Householders subsequently kept digital diaries of their working days ahead of follow up interviews in which we got them to reflect on their past few weeks working from home with reference to the textual and photographic diaries they had shared with us. In contrast to the tight geographic focus of The Shut-In Worker project and its fairly conventional methodology, the Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking project was envisaged as a global project and driven by an experimental participant-led approach. Involving more than 150 people from 26 countries during 2020, the project was grounded in autoethnography practice and critical pedagogy. Over 21 days, we offered self-guided prompts for ourselves and the other participants—a wide range of creative practitioners, scholar activists, and researchers—to explore their own lived experience. Participants with varying degrees of experience with qualitative methods and/or autoethnography started working with the research questions we had posed in our call; some independently, some in collaboration. The autoethnographic lens used in our study encouraged contributors to document their experience from and through their bodies, their situated daily routines, and their relations with embedded, embodied, and ubiquitous digital technologies. The lens enabled deep exploration and evocation of many of the complexities, profound paradoxes, fears, and hopes that characterise the human and machinic entanglements that bring us together and separate the planetary “us” in this moment (Markham et al. 2020). In this essay we draw on anecdotes and narratives from both studies that speak to the “Zoom experience” during COVID-19. That is, we use Zoom as a socio-technical pivot point to think about how the experience of liminality—of being on/off screen and ambiently in between—is operating to shift both our micro practices and macro structures as we experience and struggle within the rupture, “event”, and conjuncture that marks the global pandemic. What we will see is that many of those narratives depict disjointed, blurry, or confusing experiences, atmospheres, and affects. These liminal experiences are entangled in complex ways with the distinctive forms of commercial infrastructure and software that scaffold video conferencing platforms such as Zoom. Part of what is both enabling and troubling about the key proprietary platforms that increasingly host “public” participation and conversation online (and that came to play a dominant role during COVID19) in the context of what Tarleton Gillespie calls “the internet of platforms” is a sense of the hidden logics behind such platforms. The constant sense of potential dis/connection—with home computers becoming ambient portals to external others—also saw a wider experience of boundarylessness evoked by participants. Across our studies there was a sense of a complete breakdown between many pre-existing boundaries (or at least dotted lines) around work, school, play, leisure and fitness, public and media engagement, and home life. At the same time, the vocabulary of confinement and lockdown emerged from the imposition of physical boundaries or distancing between the self and others, between home and the outside world. During the “connected confinement” of COVID-19, study participants commonly expressed an affective sensation of dysphoria, with this new state of in betweenness or disorientation on and off screen, in and out of Zoom meetings, that characterises the COVID-19 experience seen by many as a temporary, unpleasant disruption to sociality as usual. Our contention is that, as disturbing as many of our experiences are and have been during lockdown, there is an important, ethically and politically generative dimension to our global experiences of liminality, and we should hold on to this state of de-normalisation. Much ink has been spilled on the generalised, global experience of videoconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic. A line of argument within this commentary speaks to the mental challenge and exhaustion—or zoom fatigue as it is now popularly termed—that many have been experiencing in attempting to work, learn, and live collectively via interactive screen technologies. We suggest zoom fatigue stands in for a much larger set of global social challenges—a complex conjuncture of microscopic ruptures, decisions within many critical junctures or turning points, and slow shifts in how we see and make sense of the world around us. If culture is habit writ large, what should we make of the new habits we are building, or the revelations that our prior ways of being in the world might not suit our present planetary needs, and maybe never did? Thus, we counter the current dominant narrative that people, regions, and countries should move on, pivot, or do whatever else it takes to transition to a “new normal”. Instead, drawing on the work of Haraway and others interested in more than human, post-anthropocenic thinking about the future, this essay contends that—on a dying planet facing major global challenges—we need to be embracing liminality and “staying with the trouble” if we are to hope to work together to imagine and create better worlds. This is not necessarily an easy step but we explore liminality and the affective components of Zoom fatigue here to challenge the assumption that stability and certainty is what we now need as a global community. If the comfort experienced by a chosen few in pre-COVID-19 times was bought at the cost of many “others” (human and more than human), how can we use the discomfort of liminality to imagine global futures that have radically transformative possibilities? On Liminality Because liminality is deeply affective and experienced both individually and collectively, it is a difficult feeling or state to put into words, much less generalised terms. It marks the uncanny or unstable experience of existing between. Being in a liminal state is marked by a profound disruption of one’s sense of self, one’s phenomenological being in the world, and in relation to others. Zoom, in and of itself, provokes a liminal experience. As this participant says: Zoom is so disorienting. I mean this literally; in that I cannot find a solid orientation toward other people. What’s worse is that I realize everyone has a different view, so we can’t even be sure of what other people might be seeing on their screen. In a real room this would not be an issue at all. The concept of liminality originally came out of attempts to capture the sense of flux and transition, rather than stasis, that shapes culture and community, exemplified during rites of passage. First developed in the early twentieth century by ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep, it was later taken up and expanded upon by British anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner, best known for his work on cultural rituals and rites of passage, describes liminality as the sense of “in betweenness” experienced as one moves from one status (say that of a child) to another (formal recognition of adulthood). For Turner, community life and the formation of societies more broadly involves periods of transition, threshold moments in which both structures and anti-structures become apparent. Bringing liminality into the contemporary digital moment, Zizi Papacharissi discusses the concept in collective terms as pertaining to the affective states of networked publics, particularly visible in the development of new social and political formations through wide scale social media responses to the Arab Spring. Liminality in this context describes the “not yet”, a state of “pre-emergence” or “emergence” of unformed potentiality. In this usage, Papacharissi builds on Turner’s description of liminality as “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (97). The pandemic has sparked another moment of liminality. Here, we conceptualise liminality as a continuous dialectical process of being pushed and pulled in various directions, which does not necessarily resolve into a stable state or position. Shifting one’s entire lifeworld into and onto computer screens and the micro screens of Zoom, as experienced by many around the world, collapses the usual functioning norms that maintain some degree of distinction between the social, intimate, political, and work spheres of everyday life. But this shift also creates new boundaries and new rules of engagement. As a result, people in our studies often talked about experiencing competing realities about “where” they are, and/or a feeling of being tugged by contradictory or competing forces that, because they cannot be easily resolved, keep us in an unsettled, uncomfortable state of being in the world. Here the dysphoric experiences associated not just with digital liminality but with the broader COVID-19 epidemiological-socio-political conjuncture are illustrated by Sianne Ngai’s work on the politics of affect and “ugly feelings” in the context of capitalism’s relentlessly affirmative culture. Rather than dismissing the vague feelings of unease that, for many of us, go hand in hand with late modern life, Ngai suggests that such generalised and dispersed affective states are important markers of and guides to the big social and cultural problems of our time—the injustices, inequalities, and alienating effects of late capitalism. While critical attention tends to be paid to more powerful emotions such as anger and fear, Ngai argues that softer and more nebulous forms of negative affect—from envy and anxiety to paranoia—can tell us much about the structures, institutions, and practices that frame social action. These enabling and constraining processes occur at different and intersecting levels. At the micro level of the screen interface, jarring experiences can set us to wondering about where we are (on or off screen, in place and space), how we appear to others, and whether or not we should showcase and highlight our “presence”. We have been struck by how people in our studies expressed the sense of being handled or managed by the interfaces of Zoom or Microsoft Teams, which frame people in grid layouts, yet can shift and alter these frames in unanticipated ways. I hate Zoom. Everything about it. Sometimes I see a giant person, shoved to the front of the meeting in “speaker view” to appear larger than anyone else on the screen. People constantly appear and disappear, popping in and out. Sometimes, Zoom just rearranges people seemingly randomly. People commonly experience themselves or others being resized, frozen, or “glitched”, muted, accidentally unmuted, suddenly disconnected, or relegated to the second or third “page” of attendees. Those of us who attend many meetings as a part of work or education may enjoy the anonymity of appearing at a meeting without our faces or bodies, only appearing to others as a nearly blank square or circle, perhaps with a notation of our name and whether or not we are muted. Being on the third page of participants means we are out of sight, for better or worse. For some, being less visible is a choice, even a tactic. For others, it is not a choice, but based on lack of access to a fast or stable Internet connection. The experience and impact of these micro elements of presence within the digital moment differs, depending on where you appear to others in the interface, how much power you have over the shape or flow of the interaction or interface settings, or what your role is. Moving beyond the experience of the interface and turning to the middle range between micro and macro worlds, participants speak of attempting to manage blurred or completely collapsed boundaries between “here” and “there”. Being neither completely at work or school nor completely at home means finding new ways of negotiating the intimate and the formal, the domestic and the public. This delineation is for many not a matter of carving out specific times or spaces for each, but rather a process of shifting back and forth between makeshift boundaries that may be temporal or spatial, depending on various aspects of one’s situation. Many of us most likely could see the traces of this continuous shifting back and forth via what Susan Leigh Star called “boundary objects”. While she may not have intended this concept in such concrete terms, we could see these literally, in the often humorous but significantly disruptive introduction of various domestic actants during school or work, such as pets, children, partners, laundry baskets, beds, distinctive home decor, ambient noise, etc. Other trends highlight the difficulty of maintaining zones of work and school when these overlap with the rest of the physical household. One might place Post-it Notes on the kitchen wall saying “I’m in a Zoom meeting so don’t come into the living room” or blur one’s screen background to obscure one’s domestic location. These are all strategies of maintaining ontological security in an otherwise chaotic process of being both here and there, and neither here nor there. Yet even with these strategies, there is a constant dialectical liminality at play. In none of these examples do participants feel like they are either at home or at work; instead, they are constantly shifting in between, trying to balance, or straddling physical and virtual, public and private, in terms of social “roles” and “locations”. These negotiations highlight the “ongoingness” of and the labour involved in maintaining some semblance of balance within what is inherently an unbalanced dialectical process. Participants talked about and showed in their diaries and pictures developed for the research projects the ways they act through, work with, or sometimes just try to ignore these opposing states. The rise of home-based videoconferencing and associated boundary management practices have also highlighted what has been marginalised or forgotten and conversely, prioritised or valorised in prior sociotechnical assemblages that were simply taken for granted. Take for example the everyday practices of being in a work versus domestic lifeworld; deciding how to handle the labor of cleaning cups and dishes used by the “employees” and “students” in the family throughout the day, the tasks of enforcing school attendance by children attending classes in the family home etc. This increased consciousness—at both a household and more public level—of a previously often invisible and feminised care economy speaks to larger questions raised by the lockdown experience. At the same time as people in our studies were negotiating the glitches of screen presence and the weird boundarylessness of home-leisure-domestic-school-work life, many expressed an awareness of a troubling bigger picture. First, we had just the COVID lockdowns, you know, that time where many of us were seemingly “all together” in this, at home watching Tiger King, putting neighborly messages in our windows, or sharing sourdough recipes on social media. Then Black Lives Matters movements happened. Suddenly attention is shifted to the fact that we’re not all in this together. In Melbourne, people in social housing towers got abruptly locked down without even the chance to go to the store for food first, and yet somehow the wealthy or celebrity types are not under this heavy surveillance; they can just skip the mandatory quarantine. ... We can’t just go on with things as usual ... there are so many considerations now. Narratives like these suggest that while 2020 might have begun with the pandemic, the year raised multiple other issues. As many things have been destabilised, the nature or practice of everyday life is shifting under our feet. Around the world, people are learning how to remain more distanced from each other, and the rhythms of temporal and geographic movement are adapting to an era of the pandemic. Simultaneously, many people talk about an endlessly arriving (but never quite here) moment when things will be back to normal, implying not only that this feeling of uncertainty will fade, but also that the zone of comfort is in what was known and experienced previously, rather than in a state of something radically different. This sentiment is strong despite the general agreement that “we will never [be able to] go back to how it was, but [must] proceed to some ‘new normal’”. Still, as the participant above suggests, the pandemic has also offered a much broader challenge to wider, taken-for-granted social, political, and economic structures that underpin late capitalist nations in particular. The question then becomes: How do we imagine “moving on” from the pandemic, while learning from the disruptive yet critical moment it has offered us as a global community? Learning from Liminality I don’t want us to go back to “normal”, if that means we are just all commuting in our carbon spitting cars to work and back or traveling endlessly and without a care for the planet. COVID has made my life better. Not having to drive an hour each way to work every day—that’s a massive benefit. While it’s been a struggle, the tradeoff is spending more time with loved ones—it’s a better quality of life, we have to rethink the place of work. I can’t believe how much more I’ve been involved in huge discussions about politics and society and the planet. None of this would have been on my radar pre-COVID. What would it mean then to live with as well as learn from the reflexive sense of being and experience associated with the dis-comforts of living on and off screen, a Zoom liminality, if you will? These statements from participants speak precisely to the budding consciousness of new potential ways of being in a post-COVID-19 world. They come from a place of discomfort and represent dialectic tensions that perhaps should not be shrugged off or too easily resolved. Indeed, how might we consider this as the preferred state, rather than being simply a “rite of passage” that implies some pathway toward more stable identities and structured ways of being? The varied concepts of “becoming”, “not quite yet”, “boundary work”, or “staying with the trouble”, elaborated by Karen Barad, Andrew Pickering, Susan Leigh Star, and Donna Haraway respectively, all point to ways of being, acting, and thinking through and with liminality. All these thinkers are linked by their championing of murky and mangled conceptions of experience and more than human relations. Challenging notions of the bounded individual of rational humanism, these post-human scholars offer an often-uncomfortable picture of being in and through multiplicity, of modes of agency born out of a slippage between the one and the many. While, as we noted above, this experience of in betweenness and entanglement is often linked to emotions we perceive as negative, “ugly feelings”, for Barad et al., such liminal moments offer fundamentally productive and experimental modalities that enable possibilities for new configurations of being and doing the social in the anthropocene. Further, liminality as a concept potentially becomes radically progressive when it is seen as both critically appraising the constructed and conventional nature of prior patterns of living and offering a range of reflexive alternatives. People in our studies spoke of the pandemic moment as offering tantalizing glimpses of what kinder, more caring, and egalitarian futures might look like. At the same time, many were also surprised by (and skeptical of) the banality and randomness of the rise of commercial platforms like Zoom as a “choice” for being with others in this current lifeworld, emerging as it did as an ad hoc, quick solution that met the demands of the moment. Zoom fatigue then also suggests a discomfort about somehow being expected to fully incorporate proprietary platforms like Zoom and their algorithmic logics as a core way of living and being in the post-COVID-19 world. In this sense the fact that a specific platform has become a branded eponym for the experience of online public communicative fatigue is telling indeed. The unease around the centrality of video conferencing to everyday life during COVID-19 can in part be seen as a marker of anxieties about the growing role of decentralized, private platforms in “replacing or merging with public infrastructure, [thereby] creating new social effects” (Lee). Further, jokes and off-hand comments by study participants about their messy domestic interiors being publicized via social media or their boss monitoring when they are on and offline speak to larger concerns around surveillance and privacy in online spaces, particularly communicative environments where unregulated private platforms rather than public infrastructures are becoming the default norm. But just as people are both accepting of and troubled by a growing sense of inevitability about Zoom, we also saw them experimenting with a range of other ways of being with others, from online cocktail parties to experimenting with more playful and creative apps and platforms. What these participants have shown us is the need to “stay with the trouble” or remain in this liminal space as long as possible. While we do not have the space to discuss this possibility in this short provocation, Haraway sees this experimental mode of being as involving multiple actants, human and nonhuman, and as constituting important work in terms of speculating and figuring with various “what if” scenarios to generate new possible futures. As Haraway puts it, this process of speculative figuring is one of giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads, and so mostly failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for flourishing in terran worlding. This struggle of course takes us far beyond decisions about Zoom, specifically. This deliberately troubling liminality is a process of recognizing old habits, building new ones, doing the hard work of reconsidering broader social formations in a future that promises more trouble. Governments, institutions, corporate entities, and even social movements like Transition Towns or #BuildBackBetter all seem to be calling for getting out of this liminal zone, whether this is to “bounce back” by returning to hyper-consumerist, wasteful, profit-driven modes of life or the opposite, to “bounce forward” to radically rethink globalization and build intensely localized personal and social formations. Perhaps a third alternative is to embrace this very transitional experience itself and consider whether life on a troubled, perhaps dying planet might require our discomfort, unease, and in-betweenness, including acknowledging and sometimes embracing “glitches” and failures (Nunes). Transitionality, or more broadly liminality, has the potential to enhance our understanding of who and what “we” are, or perhaps more crucially who “we” might become, by encompassing a kind of dialectic in relation to the experiences of others, both intimate and distant. As many critical commentators before us have suggested, this necessarily involves working in conjunction with a rich ecology of planetary agents from First People’s actors and knowledge systems--a range of social agents who already know what it is to be liminal to landscapes and other species--through and with the enabling affordances of digital technologies. This is an important, and exhausting, process of change. And perhaps this trouble is something to hang on to as long as possible, as it preoccupies us with wondering about what is happening in the lines between our faces, the lines of the technologies underpinning our interactions, the taken for granted structures on and off screen that have been visibilized. We are fatigued, not by the time we spend online, although there is that, too, but by the recognition that the world is changing. References Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2006. Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale UP 2018. Haraway, Donna J. “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far.” Ada New Media 3 (2013). <http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway>. Lee, Ashlin. “In the Shadow of Platforms: Challenges and Opportunities for the Shadow of Hierarchy in the Age of Platforms and Datafication.” M/C Journal 24.2 (2021). <http://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2750>. Markham, Annette N., et al. “Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking during COVID-19 Times.” Qualitative Inquiry Oct. 2020. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420962477>. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005. Nunes, Mark. Error, Glitch, Noise and Jam in New Media Cultures. Bloomsbury, 2012. Papacharissi, Zizi. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford UP, 2015. Pickering, Andrew. “The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science.” American Journal of Sociology 99.3 (1993): 559-89. Star, Susan Leigh. “The Structure of Ill-Structured Solutions: Boundary Objects and Heterogeneous Distributed Problem Solving.” Readings in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Eds. Les Gasser and Michael N. Huhns. Kaufman, 1989. 37-54. Turner, Victor. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” The Forests of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell UP, 1967. 93-111. Turner, Victor. “Liminality and Communitas”. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Al<line Publishing, 1969. 94-113, 125-30.