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. Firstly, the project team will conduct a large, nationwide survey of serving officers and police employees to collect information on sleep, fatigue, shift patterns and driving behaviour. This survey is now closed - you can view the prize winners here.

The team will then collect information from officers across several working weeks, in a two week diary study and online vigilance assessment, before combining this with other data such as on-board driving telematics, to model effects of fatigue and sleep patterns.

This integrated approach will aim to develop a publicly available online tool to enable the ‘sleepiness risk’ to be estimated.

This short video by Nottingham Trent University explains the 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.