Because of costly and complicated diagnostics and treatments, sleep science only has little to offer those with sleep problems. In this regard, researchers aim to drastically change this scenario with a new way of measuring sleep:

The IST project SENSATION is an ambitious project of 46 partners from 20 different countries, addressing sensing of physiological parameters, core computation, medical and industrial research. The aim is to take sleep research to a whole new level by developing a multipurpose sensing platform consisting of 17 micro sensors and two nano sensors, connected through a local area network.

The sensors will allow you to sleep at your normal home environment, making the results more reliable instead of going to a sleep-lab for sleep evaluation and measurement, which is actually more costly and not as reliable.

There is a huge application for this project and the impact is potentially strong: from monitoring aircraft pilots to monitoring babies (to prevent cot death), to studying people's biorhythms to help plan their work shifts.

There are currently nine sensors ready whose prototypes will be presented at the International conference on Monitoring sleep and sleepiness - from physiology to new sensors to be held in Switzerland 29-30 May 2006.

Beginning of next year, real-life tests of the prototypes and the entire sleep platform is scheduled to start.

Source: [IST Results]