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When Fatigue Becomes Fatal: Voice AI and the Future of Worker Safety

Fatigue isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a $400 billion problem. In this episode of Things Have Changed, we sit down with Yujie Wang, founder of Vocadian, to talk about a silent workplace epidemic that affects doctors, truckers, miners, and factory workers alike: occupational fatigue.

Yujie draws from his time at MIT and Harvard to share how cutting-edge voice-AI and circadian science can detect fatigue before disaster strikes. After a near-eyeball-loss accident involving a fatigued driver, Yujie dove into research, developing a non-intrusive, voice-based biometric that can flag impairment in just 30 seconds—no wearables needed.

We explore:

• How shifting sleep-wake cycles and cognitive weariness impact high-risk professions.
• The creative ways Vocadian integrates voice screening into pre-shift checklists, sometimes alongside mining booths or safety training modules.
• Why multimodal data—including environmental factors and scheduling—is critical for accurate insights.
• The ecosystem around worker safety: companies, insurers, unions, and regulators all play a part in making this tech useful and accepted.

From the rumble of highways to the flattened hospital corridors, you’ll hear stories of close calls—and how voice might just be the early warning we desperately need.

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