Simulation Ecosystem Development for Validation of Emerging Technologies within the Autonomous Casualty Care (AC2) Research Portfolio

Purpose

This solicitation, issued by MTEC, represents a Request for Project Proposals (RPP) for MTEC in support of the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) focused on establishing an array of venues where medics, other caregivers, and simulated patients agree to participate in Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) training while wearing suites of sensing technologies. This effort is aimed at providing a controlled venue to conduct these training events that is hyper realistic with respect to battlefield conditions.

Scope of Work

Background

The Military Health System (MHS) lacks a robust, accurate, and reliable methodology to collect, store, and track TCCC data. Establishing a prehospital environment data set (e.g., TCCC, prolonged casualty care (PCC), and/or en route casualty care (ERCC)) is an essential, foundational step to modernizing Military TCCC medical care. Without a means to collect data reliably and passively from the point of injury (POI) through higher echelons of care, the MHS will continue to lack the essential data to develop trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) to support future concepts that will sustain medical operations in the various environments of Multi-Domain Operations (MDO).

Military medics and combat lifesavers often find that pausing care delivery to generate medical documentation is challenging, if not impossible, in many instances. Being able to capture the medical care being delivered in these venues may be secondary to saving lives in that moment; however, the need for timely, accurate medical documentation remains. To enhance TCCC and improve medical documentation in the MHS, a passive (i.e., with minimal human effort) documentation solution of medical care in operational environments is an essential requirement to establishing these critical TCCC data sets. Furthermore, it is vital that the processes in collecting this data does not distract the medic/caregiver’s capability and capacity to deliver care.

To address this need, TATRC has recently initiated the Autonomous Casualty Care (AC2) Research Portfolio. This research portfolio seeks to develop systems of sensor suites that passively collect accurate and reliable data about casualty status, caregiver (e.g., medic and/or combat lifesaver) actions, and real time resource usage. TATRC will collect data during TCCC to develop a data set that describes casualty care. One use of this data (and associated algorithms) is to automate documentation of TCCC (e.g., DD Form 1380).

Please note that this RPP is one piece that all contributes to TATRC’s AC2 Research Portfolio, in this instance, to collect data from prolonged casualty care simulation events that will be leveraged to drive algorithms for autonomous documentation in a future phase of the overarching effort.

Points of Contact

For inquiries, please direct your correspondence to Biomedical Research Associate Chuck Hutti, Ph.D. at Chuck.Hutti@ati.org.