Monitoring Performance and Environmental

The ability to assess mental and physical performance, in an au-tomated and minimally intrusive manner, is critical for the conduct of military field studies and applied research in nutrition, neuro-science, and environmental and occupational medicine. Technologies that are currently available for automated field assessment of per-formance are limited, and commercially available methods for am-bulatory monitoring, such as the activity monitor (actigraph), do not directly assess any aspect of performance. This paper will in-troduce a new device, the U.S. Army Research Institute of Envi-ronmental Medicine vigilance monitor, which was developed for assessment of human performance in an automated, continuous manner in the field. The monitor has evolved from the actigraph and from microcomputer-based tests of cognitive function. The de-vice continuously monitors and records certain aspects of human performance and, like the actigraph, patterns of activity of the wearer. The device assesses vigilance and reaction time by presenting au-ditory stimuli and by assessing the wearer's responses. In addition, the USARIEM vigilance monitor continuously assesses a variety of environmental conditions that are of relevance to the mental and physical performance and health of the wearer such as: ambient il-lumination, sound, and temperature. The device is small enough to be worn on the wrist or belt and, like the actigraph, is completely self-contained, requiring no external input to perform all of its func-tions for several days. Preliminary data from several military field studies employing the device will be presented, and some of the implications of this new assessment technology will be dis-cussed