Nintendo® Wii Fit based sleepiness tester detects impairment of postural steadiness due to 24 h of wakefulness

A field-usable sleepiness tester could reduce sleepiness related accidents. 15 subjects’ postural steadiness was measured with a Nintendo® Wii Fit balance board every hour for 24 h. Body sway was quantified with complexity index, CI, and the correlation between CI and alertness predicted by a three-process model of sleepiness was calculated. The CI group average was 8.9 ± 1.3 for alert and 7.9 ± 1.4 for sleep deprived subjects (p < 0.001, ρ = 0.94). The Wii Fit board detects the impairment of postural steadiness. This may allow large scale sleepiness testing outside the laboratory setting.