CDA
May 18, 2023
A test is being developed that, like a breathalyzer test, will detect tiredness and drowsiness in drivers.
Tiredness and drowsiness behind the wheel cause many traffic accidents each year. Now a new technology could accurately detect if lack of sleep has been the cause of an accident and would make it easier to take action against the driver (or employer) at fault.
All this thanks to a blood test that will determine if a motorist has caused an accident by being tired while driving. And we’re not talking about a minor problem, as recent research suggests that driving on less than five hours of sleep is just as dangerous as exceeding the legal blood alcohol limit in many countries.
It will be able to detect if you have not slept enough
“There has to be a system to check if someone has slept enoughbecause you might be endangering other people’s lives,” says Professor Steven Lockley, a sleep expert at Harvard Medical School who advises NASA on sleep safety.
“Alcohol is one of the main causes of death on the road, speeding is another and fatigue is one of them. But although the solution to the fatigue is quite simple, and consists of getting more sleep, our ability to control it is diminished because We don’t have the tools to monitor it. as we do with alcohol”, points out Professor Clare Anderson, from Monash University, in Melbourne (Australia) and one of the scientists involved in the research.
Anderson’s team has identified five biomarkers in the blood that can detect if someone has been awake for 24 hours or more with greater than 99 percent accuracy. “They are closely related to how long a person has been awake and are identical in all people,” explains Anderson.
We explain how to avoid the risk of sleep at the wheel
According to the researcher, further work is needed to validate the markers and investigate whether they can quantify whether someone has slept, for example, five or just two hours, although she is confident that this forensic blood test to detect lack of sleep, which could be performed together with existing drug and alcohol tests, could be ready within two years in hospitals.
Portable road tests will take longerbecause sensors and devices have yet to be developed to detect biomarkers, but it would not be surprising if in the next decade it is normal among road agents.
