Field Study Capabilities
The technology vital to field studies has been developed over the past 20 years at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where Dr. Gregory Belenky previously conducted his research.
Dr. Belenky, Director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center, helped develop two devices for the objective measurement of sleep and performance in the operational (field) environment:
- The Sleep Watch Actigraph, an unobtrusive device worn on the wrist that measures arm movement and can produce a sleep/wake history over months of continuous recording;
- The Palm Pilot (or equivalent PDA) Test Battery used to administer cognitive tests and thereby measure performance over days, weeks, and months.
The use of these devices and methods enables the monitoring of
performance capability and the identification of high-risk work schedules.
Dr. Belenky holds patents on a system and method for predicting human
cognitive performance using the actigraph, an actigraph sleep-scoring
algorithm, and a mathematical model that predicts performance on the basis
of prior sleep/wake history.