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Performance testing provides an important complement to urine testing as a determinant of fitness for duty. Performance testing can be conducted immediately to screen out impaired workers before they undertake safety related job functions. Urine testing involves the expense and delay of laboratory testing, and results relate more to life style than current on-the-job performance capability. This paper reviews performance based testing and discusses the development and application of two performance based screening devices. One device has the capability of rapidly screening for impaired psychomotor performance given previous baseline data. The second device provides the potential for screening psychomotor and divided attention performance without prior experience or baseline data.

Operator fatigue and time-of-day induced variations in cognitive effectiveness can lead to lapses in attention, slowed reactions, and impaired reasoning and decision-making that has been shown to contribute to accidents, incidents and errors in a host of industrial and military settings. During the past three years, the US Air Force has sponsored the development of a model of human fatigue and circadian variation and a scheduling tool based upon the model that will be used to minimize aircrew fatigue. The initial test version of the tool has passed review by the operational wings of the AF and a final operational product is in advanced development and validation. The software was developed by SAIC and NTI and is called the Fatigue Avoidance Scheduling Tool (FAST™). This fatigue forecasting system is being developed and tested by NTI under a small business innovative research (SBIR) grant from the US Air Force, now in the third year of a three-year program.