291 — Caffeine dosing strategies to optimize alertness during sleep loss

An appropriate paper to read today, after waking up at 4 and accidentally doing a Day.

This research puts forth an optimization metric that minimizes the amount of caffeine required to maintain good neurobehavioral performance for sleep-deprived individuals taking behavioral tests: This algorithm includes constraints such as total dose, the discrete amounts of each caffeine dose, and time-intervals across which the doses might be spread (otherwise it’s possible to wind up with a “continuous-drip” style of dose distribution).

[ break from writing for coffee ]

This system develops a human-specific but sleep-deprivation-generalizable model that satisfies the above constraints while also optimizing the individual’s performance on various exams such as the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT). In light of research suggesting that large amounts of caffeine consumption have negative impacts on an individual’s recovery from sleep-deprivation conditions (go figure), this system aims to minimize caffeine intake, and in the experimental results, succeeds by reducing caffeine intake by 64% while still maintaining similar performance compared to other studies.