Before long, every American soldier in a battlefield situation will wear a personal physiological status monitor that will send commanders radio telemetry readings on the soldiers condition.


The device will provide readings on the soldiers heartbeat, calorie burn rate, hydration status, and sleep status, says Dr. Greg Belenky, the new director for sleep studies at the fledgling Spokane Alliance for Medical Research.


The battalion commander manages fuel, says Belenky, You wouldnt ask him to manage fuel unless he knew how much of it he has. Right now, he says, society as well as the military has such a lack of knowledge about sleep.


Belenky is a 59-year-old U.S. Army colonel who for two decades has run the Armys research program on sleep and performance and is just now leaving the service after 29 years. The alliance is a collaboration between Spokane-based Hollister-Stier Laboratories LLC and Inland Northwest Health Services, Washington State University, the University of Washington, Eastern Washington University, Whitworth College, the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce, Battelle Memorial Institute, and the Intec economic-development agency here.


In Spokane, Belenky will head up a program that will study the relationship between sleep and performance in the everyday lives of normal and clinical populations. At its four-bedroom sleep suite, it will conduct studies to evaluate people who dont have sleep disorders to study how sleep restrictions affect them, Belenky says.


We will restrict them in their sleep by, for example, limiting subjects to three hours of sleep a night for seven successive nights, he says. It hasnt been decided yet where the sleep suite will be located, although Belenkys office at least at first will be in the Health Sciences Building, at the Riverpoint Higher Education Park.


The subjects will stay in the sleep suite for such periods as a week or two weeks, Belenky says. The lab will evaluate how the subjects respond to certain levels of sleep deprivation, then use its findings to identify high-risk schedules and to improve mathematical models used to predict performance based on sleep, Belenky says.


Such information can be used by industry and the military, and the labs work could be useful in such fields as medicine, law enforcement and fire fighting, management of transportation and shift workers and others in industry, and in the military, he says.


For instance, researchers have shown that most medical errors involve so-called failure to rescue, in which medical practitioners fail to see that a pattern of tests or other indicators shows that a patient either has a health problem or that a problem is worsening, Belenky says. Sleep comes into play because doctors and other medical personnel work demanding schedules, such as during lengthy surgical rotations or when emergencies occur at any time of day or night, causing chronic sleep deprivation and affecting their ability to perform.


Belenky hopes to work with hospitals here to perform sleep-related research on medical personnel, but says any studies that involve medical errors can be sensitive. He says hell have to build relationships with the hospitals to do such studies. He also will assure the hospitals that the sleep research centers lab wont compete with the clinical sleep labs at Sacred Heart Medical Center, Deaconess Medical Center, and Holy Family Hospital, which practitioners use to diagnose sleep disorders in patients.


Our lab will not be a clinical lab, he says. I hope that we can team with the sleep-medicine community here to do pre- and post-treatment studies of people who have sleep disorders, he says.


The new sleep research program should offer promise for improved sleep management, he says.


Sleep researchers at Washington State University already believe that a blood test can be developed to determine a persons sensitivity to sleep deprivation, says Belenky, who in his new position also will be a research professor at WSU-Spokane. With such a tool, you could test a person and give them advice on their ability to handle sleep deprivation, which could help them as they choose a career or, if theyre struggling with a sleep disorder, help them make adjustments in their work life, Belenky says.


Police and fire departments can benefit from sleep research because they have scheduling challenges that can involve sleep issues, Belenky says. He adds that improved knowledge about sleep would have broad applicability in the private sector as well.


Belenky would like to recruit another sleep scientist and probably a study manager and a sleep-medicine technician for the centers staff. Thus far, the center is being funded with $5 million from the U.S. Department of Defense, $50,000 from the U.S. Department of Labor, and $20,000 from the Inland Northwest Technology and Education Center.


Belenky, a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, is happy to be returning to the West after having lived in the East for many years.


I never got used to East Coast living, he says. I like complex terrain. I love cross-country skiing. I like to hike, and scuba dive. My license plate says KELP. Im a kelp-bed diver. He was a competitive swimmer in high school, and says hes still a good swimmer.


Belenky says his family will follow him to Spokane in a year from Maryland.


During the first Gulf War, Belenky was deployed as regimental psychiatrist for the 2nd Armored Calvary Regiment. We led (Gen. Norman) Schwartzkopfs left hook through Iraq into Kuwait, he says.


Belenky took over the Armys research program on sleep and performance in 1984. We started with nothing and built the program, he says. Its at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, in Silver Spring, Md., which is the Armys largest medical research and development lab.


The program has done brain-imaging studies that showed judgment, anticipation, planning, creativity, and mental flexibility all suffer when personnel are deprived of sleep, Belenky says. Also, sleep-deprived personnel tend to come up with a solution to a problem that doesnt work, then repeat it even after theyve seen it wont work, he says.


During his years with the Armys sleep research program, the Army also studied sleep-inducing drugs that cause personnel to enter recuperative sleep despite poor sleep conditions, such as during a long-haul transport flight, Belenky says. Those drugs can be effective immediately, but when you wake people up at the peak of drug effect, theyre impaired, he says. The Army also studied drugs that bring people back to full alert nearly immediately, he says.


Belenky says he developed his interest in sleep research while in medical school at Stanford University, where he did lab work with Dr. William Dement, whom he calls the father of sleep medicine.


Dement told us, We know that sleep restores the ability to perform, but we dont know how, Belenky says. We still dont know how.


Its known that a mix of rapid-eye-movement and non-rapid-eye-movement sleep is restorative, but how this restores subsequent daytime performance, we dont know, Belenky adds.