SleepiEST project | Oscar Kilo

SleepiEST is a research project which aims to reduce road crashes caused by sleepiness through monitoring shift-workers who drive either as part of their work, or when commuting - with the data being used to estimate and predict motorists’ fatigue levels.

The Road Safety Trust has awarded funding to Nottingham Trent University (NTU) and we are working alongside them to carry out the three-year SleepiEST project.

The project will result in a publicly available online fatigue management tool.

Although the research will focus on police officers and other police employees, the findings will be applicable to a wide range of shift workers, and those who drive to and from work outside normal working hours.

The project is being led by Professor John Groeger and Dr Fran Pilkington-Cheney, psychologists and sleep experts from NTU’s School of Social Sciences.

Data collection will occur in three phases. The first phase of the SleepiEst study concluded in January 2024. Thank you to all those who participated – we had almost 6000 responses!

We are keen to provide a brief update with regards to some of the initial findings whilst the research team continue to examine the data collected. The below infographic shows key findings in the areas of sleep, wellbeing and driving.

Some of the findings are similar to those in other surveys that we have conducted in recent times, including the National wellbeing survey. We know that insufficient sleep, along with excessive fatigue are ongoing issues in policing and amongst shift workers in general, which is why we have developed services to assist in improving sleep and reducing fatigue.

Take a look at our other resources on our healthy living page if you would like to know more about improving your sleep, or check out our 'for individuals’ section if you want to explore other resources including our wellbeing toolkit and wider self-care resources.

Healthy living For individuals

Phase two

The project has now entered the second phase, which involves participants in a number of forces completing brief online questions and relevant tasks each day for a two-week period.

The end goal is to develop an online shift scheduling tool, that can reduce how often employees are expected to work and drive when sleepy, and ultimately reduce the numbers of sleepy drivers and sleep-related collisions on our roads.

This short video by Nottingham Trent University explains the SleepiEST project

Video transcript

(John Groeger, Professor of Psychology, sleep researcher)

We want to reduce the amount of sleepy driving on British roads. It's clear from the accident statistics that many crashes happen in the early hours of the morning.

There's also a peak about the time people normally travel to work and a peak again when people travel home.

Our interest is in that early morning peak.

This project will focus on shift workers, which is the main reason that most people are out and about driving in the early hours of the morning.

(Dr Fran Pilkington-Cheney, Lecturer in Psychology and Sleep)

A problem with previous approaches is the lack of large, diverse sample of workers, which is something that this project is hoping to address by working together with the National Police Wellbeing Service.

This project will collect data in three phases.

Firstly, we will conduct a large national survey to look at sleep and wellbeing challenges and the array of shift work patterns.

We will then measure the sleep and performance of a sample of those participants in order to predict sleepiness and driving risk.

This will then be validated in the final phase of our data collection by using vehicle telematic data.

(John Groeger, Professor of Psychology, sleep researcher)

We hope to bring all of these data together into a software tool, which we will make available to employers so that they can schedule their workers driving, whether it's because they drive as part of work or simply to and from work. In order for them to avoid driving at times when the drivers are likely to be sleepy.