Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello!

My name is Symone and I really love doing the science fair each year. Recently, while trying to come up with an idea, I thought about conducting an experiment where I test to see if getting an extra 20 minutes or so of sleep in the morning actually helps the body be more energized throughout the day. The way I would conduct this experiment would be through creating a simple machine that can track the brainwaves of a person sleeping. My only issue is collecting data. Would tracking the brainwaves of someone during sleep actually help answer my question? Would I also have to track things after they wake up, like mood throughout the day? Would I have to do a control group for each person I test? How many people should I test to have an accurate experiment?

Thank you!

Hello Symone!

What an amazing idea!

My first question would be: how would you quantify being “energized”? For example, would you define it in terms of cardiac activity? Based on that, you can solidify how you want to collect data – i.e. if you want to track cardiac activity, you can track metrics like resting heart rate, exercise heart rate, heart rate variability, and heart rate recovery.

I would caution against using brainwaves to track energy, since you are measuring these brainwaves while the person is sleeping – not during the day. Since you mentioned wanting to measure the level of energy throughout the day, it would be best to keep your data collection methods restricted to that time period as well.

It is best practice to include a control group in all experiments. Since your experiment is with human subjects, you can define a baseline/control as the normal amount of sleep the person gets per day – or, to stay constant across all people you are testing, you can set your control to be the energy readings you get (based on what you choose as your metrics) when the person sleeps the doctor-recommended hours for their age group.

For the number of people to test, I would recommend a number like ~9-10 people – generally, a number that’s reasonable in the allotted time you have for your science fair project, but more than 1-2 people.

Let me know if you have more questions! Super excited to see the results of your project

Anika