Sustained Operations (SUSOPS) experiments at DCIEM test how the cognitive abilities of subjects are affected by stresses such as sleep-deprivation. The original SUSOPS tasks were written on a VAX mainframe. Subjects performed the tasks at VT100 terminals. This system was the main SUSOPS system for ten years, during which DCIEM scientists performed a number of experiments, resulting in several published papers.
When several PC-based tasks were added to SUSOPS, NTT Systems integrated these into VAX SUSOPS by creating a VAX SUSOPS task that informed the subject to switch over to the PC for the next task. When the task was completed, the subject moved back to the VT100. Now, PC tasks could be run as part of the VAX suite of tasks, so long as each subject had available both a VT100 and a PC.
This version of the system was used for a large experiment in 1994 that involved scientists from Canda, France, the UK and the United States. Forty-two subjects were used in the series that ran over fourteen weeks. The purpose of the experiment was to assess the extent to which the drug Modafinil ameliorated the effects of sleep deprivation. Different conditions involved the use of placebo and amphetamines as comparators. Several papers were published in the open literature based on data collected during this experiment.
SUSOPS has continued to move away from the VAX over the years. The next step in this move occured when DCIEM scientists expressed a need to perform SUSOPS experiments in the field, and a portable pen-based version of SUSOPS was created.
The need has also arisen for a distributed, networked version of SUSOPS that would enable the experimenter to control all the subjects' workstations from a central location over a network. This newest version will complete the move away from VAX SUSOPS, and will be completely on PCs running Windows.