Occupational sleep medicine and fatigue risk management in the 24/7 society
In today’s 24/7 society, there is an increasing need for people to be awake and at work at all hours of the day. Extended work hours and night and shift work compete with the biological need to sleep and with daily rhythms driven by the biological clock.
Even small amounts of chronic sleep loss lead to increased sleepiness on the job, during the commute, and at home—jeopardizing productivity, safety, and well-being.
At Washington State University's Sleep and Performance
Research Center, we study sleep and wakefulness in
normal people—going about their everyday lives or
sequestered in the laboratory—to answer critical
questions about the effects of reduced and displaced
sleep on cognitive performance and health, and about
how these effects can be prevented or mitigated.
Browse our research
publications.
World-class sleep research facilities
The Sleep and Performance Research Center is a
10,000-square-foot research facility located on the
Riverpoint Campus in Spokane.
It includes a state-of-the-art sleep research
laboratory—a four-bedroom suite for in-residence
laboratory studies—that accommodates carefully
controlled experiments to study the effects of sleep
and sleep loss on human cognitive functioning.
The facility also includes space for faculty, staff and
trainees, and serves as a base for staging field
studies related to sleep and performance.
See the laboratory.
Laboratory studies of sleep and performance
Our sleep research laboratory provides a highly controlled environment to investigate the sleep physiology and waking behavior of individuals on precisely timed sleep schedules.
Ongoing studies focus on the effects of sleep
deprivation on cognitive performance, ranging from
simple reaction time to complex executive functioning;
and on the effectiveness of a day off to recover from
fatigue resulting from shift work.
Volunteer as a research
participant.
Field studies of sleep and performance
While laboratory studies provide fundamental knowledge
about the biology regulating sleep and performance,
field studies are needed to understand the effects of
reduced and displaced sleep on cognitive functioning in
the context of the work environment and everyday life.
Ongoing studies focus on the effects of different work
shift schedules on performance capability and
well-being; and on the effects of different flight
durations and departure times on pilot effectiveness in
commercial aviation.
Review our field study
capabilities.
Operational fatigue risk management
In safety-sensitive environments such as transportation and the military, fatigue from sleep loss puts people and operations at risk. When fatigue lines up with technical difficulties, environmental stressors and time pressure, the probability of errors and accidents increases dramatically.
In order to avoid catastrophic errors, sleep needs to be managed like other vital resources such as food or fuel supplies—a process that is part of Fatigue Risk Management. We are developing new strategies for Fatigue Risk Management, taking into account the latest discoveries about sleep and performance from our group and from collaborators around the world.
Modeling fatigue and performance
Fatigue risk management relies in part on anticipating a person’s cognitive performance deficits for a given sleep/wake/work schedule. This can be done with computer models that make quantitative predictions of performance capability over time. However, there are considerable inter-individual differences in how people respond to a particular schedule. We produced the first biomathematical model of sleep and performance that accounts for these inter-individual differences, and we are developing the first physiology-based model of performance impairment in people working extended hours and sleeping insufficiently.
