Citation

McKinley RA, McIntire LK, Schmidt R, Repperger DW, Caldwell JA. Hum. Factors 2011; 53(4): 403-414.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0018720811411297

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Objectives: This study evaluated oculometrics as a detector of fatigue in Air Force-relevant tasks after sleep deprivation. Using the metrics of total eye closure duration (PERCLOS) and approximate entropy (ApEn), the relation between these eye metrics and fatigue-induced performance decrements was investigated.Background: One damaging effect to the successful outcome of operational military missions is that attributed to sleep deprivation-induced fatigue. Consequently, there is interest in the development of reliable monitoring devices that can assess when an operator is overly fatigued.Method: Ten civilian participants volunteered to serve in this study. Each was trained on three performance tasks: target identification, unmanned aerial vehicle landing, and the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT). Experimental testing began after 14 hr awake and continued every 2 hr until 28 hr of sleep deprivation was reached.Results: Performance on the PVT and target identification tasks declined significantly as the level of sleep deprivation increased. These performance declines were paralleled more closely by changes in the ApEn compared to the PERCLOS measure.Conclusion: The results provide evidence that the ApEn eye metric can be used to detect fatigue in relevant military aviation tasks.Application: Military and commercial operators could benefit from an alertness monitoring device.