The effect of prior night sleep on simulated driving performance in medical residents

Abstract

Objective

Indications of driving performance negatively affected by poor sleep often occur early in simulated driving experiments and are measured to progress over relatively large epochs of time. How driving performance changes over smaller increments of time as a function of not only sleep quantity but also sleep quality is largely unknown. The overall objective of this work in progress is to examine the trajectory of driving performance in medical residents as a function of the prior night’s sleep quality using a high-fidelity driving simulator.

Method

Thirty-two medical residents were enrolled and wore sleep tracking devices for up to 2 weeks. The residents drove a 16-min scenario in a high-fidelity driving simulator. A mixed effects model was used to estimate baseline intercept and slope of simulated driving performance over the course of the drive. The slope of driving performance over the drive and actigraphy-estimated sleep variables from the prior 24 h served as predictors.

Results

Preliminary descriptive findings indicate a wide range of sleep quality metrics in the sample.

Conclusions

This study is among the first to focus on the trajectory of driving performance over small continuous epochs of time when simulated driving performance may first begin to degrade. Further, objective estimates of sleep using actigraphy as predictors of the next day’s driving will enhance our understanding of the potential “dose–response” between low sleep quality and crash risk in the following 24 hours.

Keywords:

• Sleep
• drowsy driving
• actigraphy
• driving simulator

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the Translational Research for Injury Prevention (TRIP) Laboratory for providing use of the driving simulator facility.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Grant No. 2T420H008436 and Grant No. K01OH011943 from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). The contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIOSH.