Biorhythms and industrial safety

Abstract

A portion of the Operations Research curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School considers the design of man/machine systems. The courses involved concentrate on the study of factors, both internal and external to the individual, which have the potential for influencing man's effciency as a system component. During the course of a discussion of the biological factors, diurnal variation specifically, the subject of "Biorhythms" was suggested as one more possible source of variation in human performance, As the subject was not familiar to the majority of students involved in the discussion, it was decided that a research project directed at clarifying the theoretical position and attempting to evaluate the data upon which the theory was based would be desirable. The results of the project suggestcd that "biorhythms” is possibly one of the older cyclical theories of human perfomance and biological functioning.