Wireless Sensors Measure the Neural Effects of Sleep Debt on Prospective Memory for Pilots

Wireless sensing of frontal lobe brain activity during flight offers an opportunity to measure the impact of sleep debt on the neural processes that support prospective memory in pilots. Pilots rely on prospective memory to remember to complete planned (future) tasks while flying. Yet, prospective memory is particularly vulnerable to sleep debt because of its reliance on a network of mental processes, such as the detection of details from the environment needed to “cue” the task. Therefore, pilots assume high risk for prospective memory failures due to their accumulation of sleep debt arising from work schedules and circadian disruptions associated with frequent time-zone changes. Because of its ability to sense rapid changes in brain activity non-obtrusively, wireless encephalography was used to investigate the effects of sleep debt on scalp electrical potentials and spectral power time-locked to prospective memory responses. During simulated automated flight segments 36 non-pilots completed a series of prospective memory tasks. Event-related potentials and spectral perturbation associated with the prospective memory responses showed that those with sleep debt accumulated over the previous week had weaker monitoring activity prior to the response, and excessive neural activity after the response. These results show the application of wireless sensors located on the scalp over the frontal lobes were sufficient to measure sleep debt related inefficiency in brain activity associated with prospective memory during automated flight.