Situational Awareness, Crew Resource Management and Operational Performance in Fatigued Two-Man Crews Using Three Stimulant Countermeasures; Conference paper

摘要

The Warfighter lives a life of critical judgments, decisions, and risk taking. There is barely enough time to perform mission-essential tasks, let alone time to rest and rejuvenate body and mind. Army researchers have done a thorough job in the pursuit of countermeasures to Soldier fatigue that do not interfere with soldier performance, when that issue is couched in terms of individual soldiers performing fairly simple, repetitive tasks. Acceptable sedatives and stimulant preparations have been identified and their operational parameters described. However, it is not known how these agents perform when the dynamics of group/team interaction are injected into the research program. The DUO-WOMBAT-CS is the primary measure examined herein, and was chosen due to its focus on crew resource management and situational awareness in a complex task environment. Army aviators were subjected to over 64 hours of sleep deprivation, and were randomly assigned to one of four stimulant conditions (dextroamphetamine, modafinil, caffeine or placebo). The participants were repeatedly tested in pairs throughout the deprivation period. Testing included the WOMBAT, flights in the USAARL UH-60 research simulator, and various other tasks. Scores were compared over time and between drug groups, for the WOMBAT and the simulator performance. The analysis suggests that performance on the crew management and situational awareness sensitive tasks done by crew-pairs is well attenuated over periods of fatigue by these stimulants. Simulator performance did not prove as sensitive to fatigue or drug condition as expected. Future work will attempt to redress this information shortfall, and to further explore the effects of these preparations on higher-order, crew based soldier activities.