Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: hamdani yusuf on 16/01/2022 15:02:55
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This article reminds me of some incidents on the road and industrial work place caused by sleep deprivation of the driver or machine operator, which could have been prevented.
https://neurosciencenews.com/sleep-deprivation-serotonin-2a-19897/
Is there a practical method to detect cognitive decline caused by sleep deprivation or intoxication? Perhaps something like blood pressure, heart rate, or brain wave detector? Non-invasive methods would be preferred. And the result should be available within few minutes.
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One aspect of sleep deprivation is how long you sleep.
- You can monitor quantity and quality of sleep with a smart watch.
- My smart watch monitors body movement and heart rate to infer how long you sleep, and whether it is light, deep or REM sleep.
- It takes almost an hour of sleep before it registers it as sleep, so it doesn't automatically count a nap (although it has a way to manually add entries)
Of course, this presumes that the person wears the smart watch to bed, and doesn't try to outsmart it
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My intention was to set up a test to determine if an operator can be permitted to operate machines based on current cognitive function before they enter the work place. Currently common practice is by measuring blood pressure, which can be done by themselves using an automatic blood pressure measuring device. But the accuracy and recall are not presumably good, since people have different base blood pressure.
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"What's the most practical method to detect sleep deprivation?"
Asking someone if they are tired.
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Some high-end motor vehicles have a real-time alertness monitor.
- The driver's eyes are monitored with an infra-red camera.
-This is able to detect longer-duration blinking and microsleeps
- This is able to detect when the driver is not watching the road - but operating an arbitrary machine presumably has a wider range of "normal" eye movements than driving a car...
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"What's the most practical method to detect sleep deprivation?"
Asking someone if they are tired.
We've done that, but incident still happened. People seem to occasionally make mistakes about their own condition. Especially when it's related to their performance evaluations.
p.s. The machine I referred to was a forklift. But the concern is also applicable for many other types of machines.