Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Electroencephalography Enabled Headband for Unobtrusive Microarousal Detection and Sleep Quality Estimation

Unrelenting operational tempo, psychological stresses due to combat exposure, and social pressures all contribute to insufficient sleep quality and the increase of US servicemember risk, especially in high consequence, forward-operating environments. Chronically degraded sleep quality produces negative outcomes on physiological and cognitive performance in the individual, and increases both health and mission risks for the operational unit.  This Phase I SBIR evaluates NIRSense’s breakthrough multimodal neurological and cerebrovascular monitor, the NIRSense Aurelian, for continuous and unobtrusive real time sleep monitoring for microarousal detection. The Aurelian was originally designed and evaluated for continuous cerebral physiological monitoring in US military tactical aircrew, and has the capabilities to support low profile monitoring in remote populations for sleep quality assessment and sleep performance improvement.  This Phase I SBIR effort will expand NIRSense’s existing collaboration with Dr. Kent Werner, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS), and the Director of Research at the Walter Reed Sleep Disorders Center at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC). Dr. Werner has evaluated the NIRSense Aurelian predecessor systems for simultaneous NIRS recording during clinical polysomnography (PSG) and continues to collaborate with NIRSense on system design and sleep evaluations.