Alex Thomson Racing at the Vendée Globe: Sleep

we're a few days into the bombay globe now we're going to be talking today about sleep how alex manages it how he tries to get it what it's like for him on board and how we look at that in a data sense in a normal one-day start you have the first 48 hours would be just extremely stressful the intensity of leaving starting a race that's going to last for 70 odd days you know all of that adds to this stress level that you don't normally see it when you look at the health data it's pretty profound how high his heart rate can be even when he's resting this year in particular the weather is very very confused it's not a simple weather scenario for the guys out there so um what you're seeing is that they're having more maneuvers and more decisions to make in a short period of time than they might normally have so it's it's really the worst of everything for them where you have the stress of the beginning of the race and on top of it a lot of variable conditions where he has to physically be making changes on a regular basis particularly in the first 24 hours or 36 hours it's not surprising at all to see no sleep at all if he is getting sleep he's going to be getting very short little maps a little intense like 10 15 minute lay downs and then one of the things you have with that is that that might not really appear as sleep because it's so short his heart rate doesn't really settle and stabilize at a low heart rate so uh that's quite a lot of what could be going on so when calculating alex's sleep we're using a number of uh sensors that are on alex and in the boat so of course we have the boat movement which we're using to understand what's the baseline because of course the platform that alex is on is quite turbulent perhaps if you've never been on a sailboat in particular a sailboat that's traveling at you know 25 knots you don't realize how turbulent turbulent and uh how much movement there just is on this boat so we're using that of course to kind of get a baseline for what is the ground that alex is trying to sleep on and then on top of that we have this sensor that alex is wearing on his upper arm together with the ppg sensor or the heart rate monitor sensor that's sitting on top of it so we use all of these things together uh plus an ai algorithm on the boat that then tries to make a best determination about whether or not alex is sleeping on the boat it's important not to think of it so binary just as alex is sleeping and not or alex is not sleeping i mean we don't do that with our own lives right we don't you know all of us maybe put our heads down on our desk for five minutes and we don't sleep at work but then we feel much better afterwards right so look at the minimum heart rate start to see when you see it diving below 70 for a minimum heart rate you know that alex is starting to rest or due to the stressful chaotic environment of the boat uh his heart rate didn't go down enough i mean alex is a busy guy right he he has to go to bed every time he goes to bed knowing that there is a list of 100 things he has to do when he wakes up so you have to understand the stressful environment that he is in right now so in the in these intense early stages of the race um it will be a constant trade-off of trying to find times when you can sleep and it's so hard because you you can always do more to make the go faster almost all the time so it's really about trying to find the times where it's the lowest loss to be able to get your head down but the other side of it is that in these early stages when you're not wanting to lose touch with the leaders you're really really alert just due to it being the start of the race it's hard to actually get yourself into a state where you can sleep the amount that we expect alex to sleep is very little i mean there will be parts of the race where hopefully he'll be getting more sleep but our our previous studies on him has shown that he sleeps about 10 12 of the day which is extremely small we're talking an hour to a day um so our expectation is not very much sleep throughout the entire race which i think is interesting if you think the context that it's 70 days right that alex is going out uh essentially putting himself through this huge sleep deprivation study right now and so lots of what we will see is an interesting lens into the state of alex right now so having been in touch with alex over the last few days it's pretty clear that he is getting some rest but that just the sheer extreme state of the early stages of this race it's it's creating a situation where alex's heart rate and stress levels it's something we've never seen before in all of the data that we've analyzed and gathered over the last few years so what that means is that our sleep detection algorithm isn't calibrated to what's happening now because it's never seen it before so as the race goes on and things settle out we're going to keep an eye on all this and hopefully this will start to settle into conditions and physical and mental state for alex that are more in line with what he's experienced in previous trainings and races and then we'll have a closer look at the data and how it handles those conditions

Channel: Nokia Bell Labs

Views: 8,745

Rating: 4.8378377 out of 5

Keywords: Alex Thomson Racing, ATR, Yachting, Vendee Globe, Nokia Bell Labs, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Nokia, Augmented Intelligence, Machine Learning, ML

Id: 6EhNjWTZPew

Length: 5min 14sec (314 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020