• Just one night of disrupted sleep means you are less capable to control posture and balance the day after
• A single bad night's sleep decreases your chance of controlling posture according to researchers at the University of Warwick, who have used state of the art sensors to monitor sleep and balance
• Implications could be that elderly people who have had a bad night's sleep are the most at risk of a fall
• Innovative solutions of how to prevent imminent falls can now by researched

Disturbances during sleep decreases capability to control posture and balance according to researchers from the School of Engineering and Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick who have an article published today in Scientific Reports (www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-36053-4)

This is the first study demonstrating the relationship between day-to-day variations in sleep quality and the reduced capability to control posture and balance, and it could pave the way to new interventions to prevent falls in later life, should the results be confirmed by other studies on older adults.

The research shows that fragmented and disrupted sleep leads to acute balance deficit.

The study was conducted by the School of Engineering in collaboration Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick.

A sample of healthy adults underwent sleep and balance assessment over two consecutive days, in order to determine the links between day-to-day variations in sleep quality and balance.

State-of-the-art wearable sensors available at the School were used for in-home sleep monitoring and lab-based balance testing. These findings are relevant to pave the way to the design of fall prevention programs in populations and settings where normal sleep is frequently disrupted, such as older people and hospital wards.

Dr Leandro Pecchia, team leader of the research from the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick says:

“We all have direct experience of this. When we do not sleep well, we may feel a little dizzy and our capability to control our posture and balance is somehow diminished. When we are fit and in good health, our body is able to adapt and we develop a strategy to keep our balance safe, avoiding falls and incidents. This ability is reduced with ageing or when there are other concomitant conditions that may compromise our ability to adapt.”

Prof Francesco Cappuccio, Head of the Sleep, Health & Society programme at the University of Warwick’s medical school, explains:

“The results obtained in healthy normal volunteers are surprising, given the ability at younger ages to compensate for such acute and short-lived sleep disruptions. We would expect more dramatic effects when these experiments be replicated in older people, whose vulnerability to sleep disruption, postural hypotension and risk of falls is much greater”.

Dr Leandro Pecchia continues:

“These results could contribute to the understanding of in-hospital falls. Hospitalised older patients find themselves in a frail condition, sleeping in an unfamiliar environment, with unusual nocturnal light and noises from other patients and nurses, and perhaps being administered more than one drug. Waking-up to go to the toilet can be more challenging than we can imagine. Having a nurse for each bed is not practical in the modern NHS and not well accepted by many older people. We need to learn how to use available technology to detect early the changes in sleep so that we can design personalised interventions that may avoid falls in the next day. One of the problems in fall prevention is that we know a frail subject will fall, but it is very difficult to predict when. Our study is first step towards finding a solution.”

The paper, Day-to-day variations in sleep quality effect standing balance in healthy adults, is published by Scientific Reports.

UK and international news outlets (e.g. the Daily Mail) have received fairly well our paper, which today is in the top 5% of all articles of a similar age based on the online attention it has received.

Dr Rossana Castaldo, recently awarded her PhD in biomedical engineering, has been awarded the William James Award 2018 by the Institute of Engineering and Technology for her work on fall prediction in hypertensive patients via short-term Heart Rate Variability Analysis recently published on IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics.

The International Union for Physical and Engineering Sciences (IUPESM) is the umbrella organization for the International Organization for Medical Physics (IOMP) and International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE). This union is regarded as the world scientific society for biomedical engineering and medical physics and federates more than 100 national societies from all the 6 continents, and the main transnational societies such as IEEE EMBSor EAMBES.

Each 3-years, the IUPESM organizes the World Congress on Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, which this year was in Prague (WC2018).

This was the first time that the University of Warwick was so well and successfullyrepresented in this important event!

Recent research results from our lab were showcased in the European Medical and Biological Engineering Conference 2017 (EMBEC’17), which took place from 11^th to 15^th June in Tampere, Finland.

Video: Dr Pecchia invited talk: "HTA of Medical Devices in LMICs"

Rossana Castaldo, current member of the Applied Biomedical Signal Processing and Intelligent eHealth Lab at the University of Warwick, was awarded a merit award for being selected among the best 10 papers presented at the Young Investigator Competition at the EMBEC’17 & NBC’17 conference held in Tampere, Finland this June. Rossana was shortlisted among 700 papers submitted, for her manuscript titled “To What Extent Can We Shorten HRV Analysis in Wearable Sensing? A Case Study on Mental Stress Detection”.