Airport security

New Training System Designed To Help Airport Screening Officers

A new training system has been designed to train more efficiently airport screening officers. The Office for Public Safety Research within the Department of Homeland Security‘s Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) has built a training system designed to help Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel conduct airport screening tasks.

TSA Security Officers are tasked with, among other things, screening every bag boarding commercial aircraft within the United States within one of 7,000 baggage screening areas at over 700 security checkpoints. Baggage screener accuracy is very important, and screeners are required to complete training both before going on the job and while employed, including one-on-one mentoring and software-based training that adapts difficulty based on a behavioral response, according to dhs.gov.

DHS said ScreenADAPT X-ray image analysis training system uses visual search research and eye-tracking technology in addition to behavioral responses to assess TSA officers’ visual search performance, according to executivegov.com.