Boffins in Australia are developing a blood test that will reveal if a driver has had enough sleep to be able to drive safely.

According to the team at Monash University in Melbourne, if its research is successful, the test will give the police the ability to prosecute motorists where fatigue is believed to have played a key role in causing an accident or risked creating one.

To date, the team has uncovered five chemical indicators in the bloodstream that can reveal with 97% accuracy whether the driver has been up for 24 hours or longer.

The next step for the researchers is to figure out if these markers can be used to determine how many hours a person has actually slept for.

Precious sleep

While creating a test fit for roadside use by the police is said to be several years away, it could be a lifesaver in the UK. For instance, it is believed 20% of all vehicle accidents involve a driver who is tired with fatigue believed to have been a contributing factor in up to 25% of accidents with fatalities or serious injuries.

Worst still, nearly half of UK drivers say they have driven on less than five hour’s sleep. That’s bad news as driving on under five hours sleep is believed to be as dangerous as driving when over the legal drink-drive limit.

“When you look at the major killers on the road, alcohol is one of them, speeding is another, and fatigue is one of them. But even though the solution to fatigue is quite simple, which is to get more sleep, our capacity to manage it is impaired because we don’t have tools to be able to monitor it like we do with alcohol.”

• Prof Clare Anderson, Monash University, Australia to The Guardian.

Young driver danger

Importantly, it’s actually young people who are most susceptible to tired driving according to Loughborough University’s Professor Ashliegh Filtness speaking at the recent annual conference Young Driver Focus.

She states that a mix of late nights and high energy lifestyles combined with a biological need for more sleep than older adults means young drivers are at greater risk of tired driving.

Arriving soon?

Currently, there is no specific law in the UK about driving while tired. Instead, anyone who is believed to have been too tired to drive and caused a fatality can be prosecuted for death by careless driving or death by dangerous driving.

While the Department for Transport has said it is not considering minimum sleep levels for motorists at this time, it has ’noted’ the work being carried out by the team in Australia. Watch this space.

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Main photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash