Driver fatigue detection in Chilean long-haul: what regulation requires and what VOS™ delivers

Chile’s Resolution 38 (Res. 38) governs driver working hours, rest windows, fatigue-management programmes and the audit trail that fleet operators must produce for the labour and transport regulators. It is the closest thing LATAM has to the European driver-hours regulation, and it applies to interurban passenger, long-haul cargo and mining operators.

A driver-monitoring system (DMS) alone does not make an operator compliant. Compliance is a paperwork problem: shift logs, rest attestations, driver signatures, incident records, corrective-action records, and a chain of custody the auditor can follow. What the DMS provides is the signal: was the driver awake, was the driver present, did the driver take the mandated rest.

Intellitech VOS™ ties the DMS signal to the compliance paperwork. A microsleep event on the cab camera generates a fatigue record, gets attached to the driver profile, generates an immediate alert to the operations desk, and lands on the Res. 38 audit trail for that driver and that shift. The operator does not run a parallel Excel.

The measurable outcome for an operator is not fewer alerts — the point of a fatigue programme is to actually catch fatigue. The measurable outcomes are: first, every legally mandated event has a paper trail; second, every driver has a rolling fatigue score visible to their supervisor; third, every audit request is one query, not one week of file gathering.

For operators piloting fatigue programmes today, the practical advice is: start with the two highest-risk routes (long haul overnight, mining commute at 04:00 or 22:00 shift change), collect four weeks of baseline, and only then set the intervention thresholds. VOS™ ships with default thresholds tuned for Chilean operators and can adjust them per route.