Most adults need around eight hours sleep per night in order to perform at their best. The amount of sleep a person needs depends on their genetics, enabling some individuals to function with less sleep while others need to hit the snooze alarm now and then.
One of the major problems with sleep deprivation is decline in cognitive ability; our brains just don’t work properly without sleep. We struggle with memory, learning, planning and reasoning.
A lack of sleep can have severe effects on our performance, ranging from irritability and low mood, through to an increased risk of heart disease as well as incidents and even accidents. Lack of sleep doesn’t just make you tired; it can have dangerous unseen effects. Some common dangers of sleep deprivation are: impaired judgement, mood disorders, raised blood pressure, performance variability, and even weight gain.
In the most recent version of CrewAlert (available for iOS on the Appstore), we've added a home screen widget making it easy to keep track of any sleep debt build-up in the past 24/48/72 hours. The functionality uses logged sleep automatically tracked by any wearable device feeding Apple Health, but can also use a manually-kept sleep diary. The logged sleep is then compared with your habitual sleep length to calculate and display any deficit - 'flagging' concerning levels with an amber or red color. A perfect reminder, and good excuse, to hit the couch for some shut-eye?
CrewAlert is available on Appstore for iPhone and iPad and is the most widely used app by pilots and cabin crew for personal fatigue risk management. The app contains the Boeing Alertness Model and allows for data collection, prediction of upcoming fatigue risk and provides advanced fatigue awareness and mitigtaion functionality.
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