Degraded task performance due to situational disabilities is not unique to NASA. Soldiers interacting with intelligent robotics and smart weapons under stressful circumstances are subject to similar performance effects. And like NASA the Department of Defense (DOD) relies on procedures to guide task performance. In consequence the proposed technology for detecting degraded performance should be of interest to DOD. This technology has application in the private sector as well. There is growing demand for technologies that increase the independence of an aging populace and enable seniors to remain in their homes longer. The proposed technology has potential application as part of home monitoring and automation technology. Seniors would interact with smart appliances through intelligent electronic instructions that monitor and correct the actions they take. This should improve both safety and quality of life. As NASA human exploration missions go further into space, astronauts must adjust to longer duration missions with less real-time support from Earth. For such missions, situational disabilities like fatigue, high workload, and skill-loss - already a problem for ISS - will only become more common. ISS provides an invaluable testbed for experimenting with techniques to detect and remediate such degraded task performance. The proposed project provides a precursor to conducting task performance experiments on the ISS. We propose to prove out non-invasive techniques for measuring task performance in real-time in an ISS like environment. We will use ISS procedures represented electronically in the NASA developed Procedure Representation Language. We will emulate the way these procedures are used with the ISS PCS displays, or next generation concepts being developed for Orion. As a result, we expect the Phase II project to produce techniques and technologies useful for such ISS experiments.
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