The Office for Public Safety Research within the Department of Homeland Security‘s Science and Technology Directorate has built a training system designed to help Transportation Security Administration personnel conduct airport screening tasks.
DHS said Wednesday the ScreenADAPT X-ray image analysis training system uses visual search research and eye-tracking technology to assess TSA officers’ visual search performance.
ScreenADAPT is built with an eye-tracking tool that works to help TSA trainers and trainees analyze if potential errors were made during bag screening as well as record trainees’ performance metrics and compare results with their peers.
DHS added the system offers diagnostic metrics on TSO performance to evaluate trainers’ and trainees’ needs.
“The different types of training address the corresponding root causes of the errors and assist in building each TSO’s mental threat image library,” said Darren Wilson, ScreenADAPT program manager at OPS-R.
TSA deployed fifty ScreenADAPT systems at airports located in Houston, Las Vegas, New York, Pittsburgh, Portland and Raleigh in an effort to assess the effectiveness of the training support tool.
Preliminary data from the assessment showed that ScreenADAPT helped increase efficiency at the research airports by approximately 45 percent, DHS noted.
