How Do We Study Sleep & Performance?

World-Class Facilities & Equipment

Ours is a cutting-edge sleep and performance research laboratory equipped to make objective measures in the lab and in the field.

Occupying 5,000 square feet in the South Campus Facility building, the lab includes

• a four-bedroom sleep suite for in-residence lab studies,
• a staging area for field studies, and
• a space for faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate and undergraduate students.

A Distinctive Method

The technology vital to field studies has been developed over the past 20 years at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where Dr. Belenky previously conducted his research.

He holds the patent on a system and method for predicting human cognitive performance using two devices:

• the sleep watch actigraph, an unobtrusive device worn on the wrist that measures arm movement and can produce a sleep/wake history over months of continuous recording;
• a Palm Pilot or equivalent PDA used to administer cognitive tests and thereby measure performance over days and months.

The use of these devices and methods

• enables the identification of high-risk schedules and
• contributes to the development of mathematical models to predict performance on the basis of prior sleep.

With their colleagues at WSU Pullman, Dr. James Krueger and Dr. David Rector, Drs. Belenky and Van Dongen are developing ambulatory optical brain imaging techniques for lab and field studies. these will enable them to monitor, in real time, the regions of the brain activated ruing sleep, waking, and waking performance.