The UK’s defence medical personnel deliver a unique service to theatres of operation across the globe, serving both military and civilian populations during wartime and peace-keeping deployments. Training the teams of outgoing medics in both the physical and cognitive skills necessary to make timely actions and decisions to save the lives of casualties entering field hospitals, places considerable demand on homeland resources such as the impressive HOSPEX facility at Strensall Barracks near York. Increasingly, interactive simulation packages are being considered to help prepare defence medics cope with the range of injuries and trauma they may be confronted with and the procedures they must execute, sometimes with only minutes to spare. Building on pioneering medical simulation research from the mid-1990s, the HFI DTC has been involved in a range of medical simulation applications, in collaboration with the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine.
The Interactive Trauma Trainer (ITT), a games-based medical simulator, was designed from the outset to demonstrate to the defence medical community the importance of exploiting human factors knowledge early in the design of training packages based on innovative interactive technologies. Following task analyses in which trauma surgery specialists were observed and filmed rehearsing patient stabilisation and emergency intubation procedures on cadavers, field hospital volunteers and mannequins, the task selected for study was lower neck fragmentation wound, causing pulsatile haemorrhage, airway obstruction and rapid patient deterioration. The results of the task analyses drove design activities relating to real-time graphical fidelity requirements, training content and interactive styles. One of the early decisions made on the basis of the task analyses was that the ITT was not destined to become a surgical skills trainer. Rather than replicate basic surgical handling skills the surgically-trained user would already possess, the simulation would be designed to enhance their decision-making skills; the virtual casualty’s life would be lost within 5-6 minutes if appropriate decisions were not taken and relevant procedures applied. Consequently, highly dextrous tasks (e.g. the handling and application of syringes, catheters, laryngoscopes, intubation tubes, Foley Catheters and so on) were committed to animation sequences, rather than complex and confusing interactions with costly input devices with limited haptic feedback. The human factors analysis was also instrumental in the development of a performance scoring process, based on the simulation user making the right decisions at the right time.
As well as the ITT, the DTC has also provided human factors consultancy to the US Office of Naval Research-funded Pulse!! Virtual Healthcare project, led by Texas A&M University Corpus Christi. Other work, in conjunction with the Defence Clinical Psychology Division of the UK’s Defence Medical Services, is addressing how gaming technologies might be exploited to provide new therapy support tools to support pre-deployment ‘stress inoculation’ for the Armed Forces and the treatment of psychological issues associated with trauma.
The project described here is from the Human Factors Integration Defence Technology Centre’s seven year R&D portfolio, which has involved very close collaboration with military end users. A comprehensive catalogue of R&D activities undertaken by the DTC can be reviewed by downloading the Centre’s 2008 Yearbook at www.hfidtc.com.
Print 
PDF