Salivary cortisol profiles of on-call from home fire and emergency service personnel
Hall et al.
The finding, in our words
Male fire and emergency service workers showed a lower cortisol awakening response and post-awakening cortisol levels the day after a night on-call with a call, likely due to noise, exertion and stress during callouts. This supports the use of decentralised saliva sampling to assess real-world physiological stress responses in working populations.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Self-collected saliva sampling in military technicians produced stable post-awakening cortisol parameters across two days, showing the expected rise thirty minutes after waking followed by recovery. Using actigraphy to verify compliance confirms that unsupervised saliva collection in free-living settings delivers reliable data for operational health surveillance of chronically stressed personnel.
Acutely concussed youth studied at home showed longer sleep latency and greater fatigue than controls, with altered overnight cortisol dynamics and lower bedtime melatonin; these home-based saliva and actigraphy measures highlight decentralised endpoints for acute concussion care.
A US survey of 3,400 adults aged 62 to 90 collected up to 15 biomeasures at home, including saliva, dried blood spots and urine, with Salivette and Oragene among the devices used, which shows that several patient-centric sampling methods can run together in home-based research.
In a 14-day study of youth with neurodevelopmental conditions and chronic pain, multimodal in-home monitoring achieved good accelerometer wear compliance (77% wore devices for at least 7 days) and moderate survey engagement, but adherence to salivary cortisol sampling was low at 28% after excluding protocol violations and dry swabs. Families reported high overall satisfaction and willingness to participate again, highlighting that remote sampling protocols in pediatric populations require iterative tailoring to improve biospecimen collection adherence.
This study found that higher pre-sleep physiological stress, measured via self-collected saliva, was linked to increased cortical arousal during sleep and more consolidated rapid eye movement sleep in adolescents. The results support the use of decentralised sampling and in-home monitoring to investigate physiological interactions in natural sleep environments.