Fatigue assessment through non-invasive physiological monitoring in military performance: protocol for a systematic review

Abstract

During military operations, soldiers often encounter extreme environmental, metabolic and neuropsychiatric conditions, which combined lead to a fatigue status that can cause serious physiological impairments, decreasing military performance on the battlefield. Comprehensive studies in realistically stressful environments are essential to expand the knowledge regarding the consequences of real-life stress exposure, facilitate development of operationally-useful techniques and promote the conception of improved treatments. Therefore, a systematic review is proposed to obtain relevant information about fatigue assessment through multiple physiological parameters in the military context, to focus on determining the associations between fatigue and physiological response in order to plan in the future adequate interventions to prevent related negative consequences. Thus, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocols (PRISMA-P) Statement, this systematic review protocol was elaborated in order to present adequate guidelines to develop a research that can provide appropriate results to fulfil the sought objective. Five databases will be accessed (SCOPUS, PubMed, Science Direct, Medline and Web of Science) and a total of 9 combinations of keywords will be used. This protocol is registered in PROSPERO under the code of PROSPERO CRD42018105833.