Citation

Smith MG, Croy I, Hammar O, Persson Waye K. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 2014; 135: 2289.

Affiliation

Occupational and Environ. Medicine, The Sahlgrenska Acad. at the Univ. of Gothenburg, Box414, Gothenburg 40530, Sweden, michael.smith@amm.gu.se.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, American Institute of Physics)

DOI

10.1121/1.4877510

PMID

25235569

Abstract

The market share of goods traffic operating on the European rail networks is expected to almost double from 2001 to 2020. Nocturnal time slots are expected to play an important part in facilitating this increase and as such sleep disturbance in residential areas is expected to be the most significant hindering factor. Little data currently exist that may be utilized to investigate the potential impact. Within the European project CargoVibes we experimentally investigated sleep disturbance due to vibration and noise arising from freight trains. An experimental trial was conducted involving 23 healthy subjects sleeping for six nights; a habituation night, a control night, and four nights with combinations of vibration and noise exposure. The primary objective was to examine the contribution of each exposure, and investigate how vibration and noise contribute individually and simultaneously to human response. The secondary aim was to determine whether increased numbers of events relative to previous work using 20-36 trains further impacted on sleep. Physiological parameters including sleep stage, cardiac activity, and cortical arousals were obtained using polysomnography and questionnaires were administered to obtain sleep quality data.

RESULTS indicate that vibration directly contributes to sleep fragmentation. The findings shall be further discussed at the conference.

Language: en