Wrist-Worn Psychomotor Vigilance Task Device Validation Study

Collecting reliable human performance data in military operational environments is an ongoing challenge. A major issue of concern is identifying systems that can capture human performance metrics in a reliable and valid manner in the field. One task that has been used extensively in the laboratory - and more recently in field settings - is the Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT). Since 2008 the PVT has been included as a feature on a wrist-worn actigraph (AMI, Inc.), thereby enabling researchers to easily administer the PVT in the field. The current project has three aims, a) to validate the 3-minute PVT which is currently embedded in the AMI actigraph, b) to explore the utility of other devices for field use, and c) to provide recommendations for the collection of PVT data in the military operational environments. In our studies, we found that when the screen backlight is illuminated, the results of the 3-minute PVT on the AMI actigraph are comparable to those from the laptop PVT. These findings demonstrate that the 3-minute PVT on the AMI actigraph is a valid alternative to the 3-minute laptop-based PVT for field assessment. Given the widespread use of hand-held devices with a touchscreen interface, we also tested a PVT application on a representative touch screen device. Our findings were disappointing, showing that the hand-held touch screen PVT system was not comparable to the validated PVT. In particular, the touch screen PVT introduced a large constant bias as well as a proportional bias that decreased the range of response speed. These findings raised the question of what the appropriate user interface should be for a field-grade PVT system. Herein, we present a method we have developed and refined over multiple years to prepare PVT data collected in field setting for analysis.