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.
