Associated data for "The impact of a short burst of exercise on sleep inertia"

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Emergency service workers perform the critical role of caring for and protecting members of the community. Emergency service work is unpredictable and shifts can include nighttime hours when workers could be sleeping. If woken from their sleep, a worker’s ability to safely and effectively perform their role can be impacted by sleep inertia. Sleep inertia is the state of reduced alertness and impaired cognition found upon waking and can be detrimental to emergency service workers who may be woken during on-call shifts or night shifts during unprotected naps (naps in which they can still be woken to work). Effective and fast acting sleep inertia countermeasures are needed to reduce the impact of sleep inertia on emergency workers’ safety and performance, however so far no such strategy has been identified.


The aim of this study is to investigate exercise, as a novel countermeasure for sleep inertia. To achieve this an experimental laboratory study was completed to determine the effect of a short burst of low intensity exercise, high intensity exercise or no exercise on cognitive performance and subjective sleepiness upon waking. Subjective sleepiness, cognitive performance, saliva samples to measure cortisol concentration, heart rate and core body temperature data were collected. Analyses will be conducted using Excel and SPSS.

This is one of three studies contributing to the final thesis. The final thesis aims to primarily investigate the effectiveness of exercise as a sleep inertia countermeasure. A secondary aim is to explore how workers experience and manage sleep inertia in the field, to advance the development and application of sleep inertia countermeasures.