Evaluation of human distress by one's walking speed - toward development of early warning system for marine pilots' condition

Sea disasters affect life of creatures including mankind and the global environment. One of the main causes of them is human error, and it is brought about `fatigue' of ship officers, captains and marine pilots. If they know the degree of their fatigue before their jobs, they can pay attention to their physical and mental conditions. When they know both their disorder conditions before their tasks, they can execute their watch carefully than usual. We believe that to recognize their conditions by themselves influences decrease of human errors and sea disasters. In this paper, the authors focus to human walking speed and measure the difference of subjects' walking speed between before their jobs and after at short distance section. To measure seafarers and pilots' walking speed at short distance is necessary for studying pilots' fatigue, because they work at limited and narrow space. The first subjects of this study are lecturers in authors' faculty. The results of the study show that difference of walking speed between before and after their lectures originate clearly such as before are faster than after speed.