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Loughborough University

Loughborough University
Leicestershire, UK
LE11 3TU
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The View - Autumn / Winter 2007

Man with wires coming from head

Battling the sleepy killer on
Britain's roads

It is something experienced by all motorists. That wave of tiredness which sweeps over you as you make the familiar journey home or travel to the early morning meeting you simply can’t miss. For some it is the last journey they make. Tiredness kills and Loughborough University’s Sleep Research Centre is trying to reduce the hundreds of needless deaths that occur every year, simply because people ignore the signs and refuse to take a break.

Twenty years ago there were no road traffic accidents caused by drivers falling asleep behind the wheel – or so the statistics would have you believe. Prior to the 1990s sleep simply was not recorded as a contributory factor to collisions.

Today it is a different story with falling asleep at the wheel now recognised as a key cause in many crashes. Motorists and employers can be held legally responsible for injuries or deaths that result from an accident where they, or their staff, are found to be driving whilst tired. High profile incidents, such as the Selby train crash, have helped reinforce this message.

The University’s Sleep Research Centre, which is led by Professor Jim Horne, has played a key part in this step change in attitude and law. Established in 1993, the Centre is world renowned for its studies on sleep and its impact on everyday life. Its state-of-the-art facilities are used to conduct detailed and precise research into a wide variety of sleep-related issues and its findings help guide national and international policy in this area.

Dr Louise ReynerDr Louise Reyner is head of the Driver Sleepiness Research Group, based within the Centre, and has been studying sleep for more than 15 years. In 1992 the research group approached several police forces across the country to try and establish how many traffic accidents they believed were being caused by driver tiredness. The police agreed to collect data for the team, and began examining evidence and asking people at crash scenes to see if sleep was a factor. Once enough data had been collected it was analysed – the results were startling.

“It was clear that up to 20 percent of traffic accidents on monotonous roads across the UK were sleep related, and that these fall asleep crashes tended to have more serious outcomes, in terms of injuries and fatalities, than a typical road accident,” Dr Reyner said. “We also found that there were key times of the day when more sleep-related collisions were occurring – in the evening and the middle of the afternoon. From our previous work on sleep patterns we knew that these were the times of the day when the body was more tired.”

This was a major breakthrough for the research group, as it provided hard evidence to support their belief that sleep was a major cause of road accidents. It also helped them to secure funding from the Department for Transport (DfT) to build an interactive car simulator to conduct further tests. Using the simulator and several sleep deprived volunteers they undertook a major study into what happens when people drive whilst tired, to see if there were any consistencies in behaviour and to assess the impact of tiredness on driving ability.

“The first thing we noticed was that there were no consistencies,” Dr Reyner explains. “It wasn’t the case that all the volunteers closed their eyes first, or that they all drift across the road in a particular direction. Each individual we tested reacted in a different way, but what was consistent was the dangerous impact it had on their driving. It was quite scary to see how having six hours sleep a night, which many people regularly do, can leave your driving severely impaired.

“We knew that all motorists at one time or another find themselves feeling sleepy when driving. So we wanted to look at the best advice we could give on what to do if this occurs. At the time there was no clear guidance on this – in fact the only advice given in the Highway Code was to ‘stop driving and stretch your legs’. It was clear to us all that this advice wasn’t adequate so we used our car simulator to test out all the methods employed by drivers to keep awake and alert. These included caffeine drinks, cold air, music and stopping for short naps.

“From these tests we immediately discovered that the age old method of opening a window works for about three minutes and then you get used to the cold air and return to a state of sleepiness. Listening to music is even worse as you actually feel better and more alert, but your driving is still severely impaired. We concluded that the best and only effective action to take was a combination treatment – to take a break, have some caffeine and then take a 15-minute nap, as the caffeine takes around 30 minutes to work.”

Following this groundbreaking research the advice put together by the Sleep Research Centre was incorporated into the Highway Code, for the first time ever providing laboratory tried and tested guidelines on tackling sleepiness for motorists.

The Centre then continued its campaign to get driver tiredness on the public agenda by placing ‘Tiredness can kill – take a break’ warning signs at the Leicester Forest East service station on the M1, with funding from the service station and the AA. These were the first signs of their kind in the country and have since been introduced by the DfT across the UK. They were later changed to ‘Tiredness kills – take a break’ to give an even stronger warning to motorists.

“It was a major breakthrough for us to get the advice in the Highway Code changed and the road signs introduced,” Dr Reyner explains. “We felt that the Government was really starting to listen to what we were saying and to accept the full extent of the problem. Our research had brought us into contact with many people who had lost a loved one in a sleep-related road accident and it was incredibly rewarding to know that our work was helping to prevent other families from going through such heartbreak.”

But are we all just as likely as each other to be involved in sleep-related road accidents or are some groups in society more at risk than others? “From our research it is clear that driving whilst tired is dangerous for everyone, but there is one group where you find a much greater number of sleep-related crashes – young men aged between 18 and 30,” Dr Reyner said. “Young men are more at risk as they need more sleep than older people and are more likely to drive when sleep deprived. The risk is also partly linked to lifestyle as they more frequently drive at night, go to bed late and then get up early to drive to work or college.

“It is really hard to get the message across to them just how dangerous driving whilst tired can be, as young people do tend to think they are invincible. My simple advice to them is don’t drive at a time of day when you are normally sleepy, such as late at night and early in the morning.”

The next phase in the Centre’s research in this area is to look at company policy towards driving. Thousands of people across the UK drive for a living or have to drive as part of their job, but few companies have a clear policy on driver tiredness or provide advice to staff on the best action to take. “

The latest figures show that around 30 percent of road accidents involve people driving for work and we are regularly contacted by people who have experienced difficulties in this area. A prime example is where a member of staff is expected to attend an early morning meeting in another part of the country but isn’t offered overnight accommodation to enable them to travel up the previous day. Instead they are forced to leave their home at 4am to get to the meeting for 7.30am.

“Those three hours between 4am and 7am are dangerous as you would normally be asleep and therefore you are liable to fall asleep rapidly when driving. And of course there is the issue of lorry drivers who regularly work throughout the early hours, and shift workers who finish their 12-hour night shift at 6am and then hop in their car completely exhausted and drive home. If an accident occurs in a factory then the Health and Safety Executive are called in to investigate – but what if your office is the cab of a lorry and you have an accident?

“This area of our research is about developing the best possible advice to give to industry about how to tackle the issue of driver tiredness. It is about changing the culture of work to make businesses take responsibility for the safety of their staff, not only in the office environment but also when they are on the road. They need to ask themselves if the hours and the times of day that they are expecting their staff to drive are acceptable and above all safe, and what alternatives they can offer. We know this isn’t going to happen over night but we are already working closely with some large organisations who have asked us to help them develop their company policies in this area.”

The Loughborough Sleep Research Centre would welcome contact from businesses interested in this area of research. Its modern facilities for sleep study, including equipment for the home recording of sleep electroencephalograms (EEGs); actimetry (body movement-monitoring during sleep); state-of-the-art computer-based systems, shiftwork safety analysis programs and driving simulator are all available for consultancy projects with external clients.

Dr Reyner said: “We have heard several instances where businesses have been offered completely inaccurate and dangerous advice on driver tiredness by people with no expertise in this area. We would urge companies to come to us so we can scientifically examine their issues and help them to come up with scientifically validated solutions.”

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