If you thought you had trouble sleeping in your own bed, try sleeping in a microgravity environment, strapped into a sleeping bag as you orbit the Earth at 17,000 miles. Astronauts find it difficult to maintain a normal sleep pattern under an artificial day-night cycle, resulting in poor sleep habits.
To monitor the astronaut sleep patterns, a group of scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark designed a small device to measure how astronauts experience sleep in space. The device is called ear-EEG (ear-ElectroEncephaloGraphy) and can be worn on the ear similar to headphones. Once attached, the ear EEG will monitor electrical activity in the astronauts’ brains while they sleep. It works by detecting extremely small voltage changes on the surface of the skin inside the ear, which are caused by electrical activity coming from neurons in the brain, according to Aarhus University.
“In the future, we will probably be in space much more often and will have to stay there longer. And it is important to understand how it affects our sleep,” Eskild Holm Nielsen, dean of the Faculty of Technical Sciences at Aarhus University, said in a statement. “Being able to do an accurate physiological characterization of sleep will also help us figure out how we can help astronauts sleep better in space.”
Astronauts are often crammed into small rooms the size of phone booths, where they’re stuffed inside a sleeping bag that’s strapped to a wall. They also operate under a fake day/night schedule that is enforced by changing the light settings on the space station from light to dark to ensure they get between 6 and 8 hours of sleep every day. Other than that, they lack the everyday comforts of resting their heads on a pillow since, well, there’s no gravity to keep their heads down, as well as the feeling of a blanket covering them.
Ear EEG will be used by astronauts aboard the International Space Station, as well as here on Earth to measure the difference in your sleep patterns between Earth and space. The data will help scientists see how much being in space affects astronauts’ sleep on a physiological level, which could affect their cognitive functions, such as decision-making ability, memory, judgment and attention span. Scientists are also curious to measure how different environments affect a person’s sleep patterns.