General Sleep & Behavioral Research
Inter-individual differences in performance impairment from sleep loss are substantial and consistent, as demonstrated and quantified here by means of the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) in two laboratory-based sleep deprivation studies. There is an urgent need, therefore, to consider inter-individual variability in biomathematical models of fatigue and performance, which currently treat individuals as being all the same. This paper demonstrates that inter-individual variability accounts for a large percentage of observed variance in neurobehavioral responses to sleep deprivation, and describes tools that model developers will need to produce a new generation of fatigue and performance models capable of incorporating inter-individual variability and useful for subject-specific prediction.
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