PVT Handheld App to Provide Warfighters with Immediate Feedback About Their Readiness to Perform

This project will achieve a handheld app to deliver the brief, 3-minute Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT) to provide immediate objective feedback to warfighters (and commanding officers) about their ability to sustain attention to mission critical tasks (e.g., route clearance, IED detection). It will be based on our vigilance testing technology that has been heavily validated to be sensitive to fatigue. Objective feedback about vigilance is critically needed because fatigue stressors (e.g., night work, sleep loss, jet lag, extended duty hours) common in military settings are associated with behavioral risks that include increased operational errors, injuries, interpersonal conflicts, and risk taking. Scientific research indicates that there are large “trait-like” differences in an individual’s vulnerability to fatigue stressors and that vulnerable individuals systematically underestimate the degree of cognitive impairment under fatiguing conditions. We have already deployed laptop-based prototype versions of the brief PVT in military settings (e.g., Afghanistan) and other extreme operations (e.g., undersea research, arctic, International Space Station). Making the brief PVT available to warfighters on a networked handheld device will provide an accessible, critically needed, operational tool to aid commanding officers in making more effective duty schedules. It will also aid warfighters in selecting effective fatigue countermeasures (e.g., caffeine).