Sleep loss and disturbed sleep can result in impaired performance. Sleep deprivation can reduce attention and vigilance by 50%, decision-making ability, communication skills, and memory. The most sensitive tasks are those, which are long and monotonous, such as driving, which become very vulnerable to the effects of sleep deprivation.
Studies have affirmed that sleep-deprived drivers are just as dangerous as drunk drivers. It has been shown that people who drive after being awake for 17 to 19 hours performed worse than those with a blood alcohol level of .05 percent. Driver sleepiness due to sleep deprivation is a causative factor in 1% to 3% of all motor vehicle crashes. Reducing the extent of the drowsy driver problem is critical to improving the safety of EU highways. Recent studies have shown the importance of developing driver fatigue countermeasure devices to help prevent driving accidents and errors. Although numerous physiological indicators are available to describe an individual
Nicos Maglaveras B.Eng.`82 Arist. Univ. of Thessaloniki, Greece, MSc `85, PhD `88 Northwestern Univ, IL, USA in Electrical Engineering with emphasis in Biomedical Engineering. In 1990 he joined the faculty of the medical school in the Lab of Medical Informatics, Aristotelian University, Thessaloniki, Greece where he is currently an Associate Professor of medical informatics.
He has performed research & development in nonlinear biological systems simulation, cardiac electrophysiology, medical expert systems, ECG/EEG analysis, physiological mapping techniques, parallel processing, medical imaging, medical informatics, health telematics and neural networks. He has also developed graduate and undergraduate courses in the areas of medical informatics, computer architecture and programming, biomedical signal processing and biological systems simulation. He has contributed in more than 150 publications in refereed international journals, books and conferences in the above mentioned areas, as well as in a number of white papers such as the healthgrid white paper and the EAMBES white paper on research directives for the FP7.
He has served as a reviewer in the CEC AIM technical reviews in the past, and in a number of international journals. Currently he is a member of the editorial board of the Methods of Information in Medicine Journal, and an associate editor in the IEEE Transactions on Information Technologies in Biomedicine. Nicos Maglaveras has participated in more than 20 Greek national research projects, the HEALTH TELEMATICS, the LEONARDO, the TMR, IST and the ESPRIT programmes of the CEC dealing mainly with biomedical informatics, computer patient records, and medical information processing and management. He has served as the scientific coordinator of the CEC funded IST projects
