With the coming of the burgeoning wearable market a few years back came a heavy emphasis on sleep—seeing as these wearables could actually monitor an athlete’s sleep. Devices like the one made by Fatigue Science can even coordinate an athlete’s performance in relation to the sleep that they get at night.
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Two researchers at the University of Arizona—Dr. Amy B. Athey and Dr. Michael Grandner—have just been given funding via the NCAA Innovations in Research and Practice grant, in order to perform studies on a student-athlete’s psychosocial well-being and mental health. In short, the two doctors will look at how sleep affects more than just an athlete’s performance on the field, but everything around them.
It is the NCAA trying to figure out how much sleep their athletes tend to get—seeing as these are young athletes, who are often living on their own for the first time in their lives. The study should also delve into how that sleep, or lack thereof, is impacting a student-athlete’s stress levels, social interactions and overall mental health.
At the conclusion, a subset of the students studied will be placed in a special program that will attempt to reconcile some of the sleep problems that they experienced during the first portion of the study. This program will include sleep-tracking technology, like the wearables mentioned above, and special lighting, among other solutions.
This type of grant generally receives between $10,000 and $39,500 from the NCAA. Four other institutions were awarded this grant, out of a total of 99 applicants. The NCAA Innovations in Research and Practice Grant Program is in its third year of operations.