CORE-Military: A Virtual Reality Platform for Emergency Care Training and Assessment in Austere Environments

In emergency medicine, time is a critical factor that can significantly influence the survival of seriously ill patients. Early recognition of clinical deterioration and rapid initial management is paramount in any setting where emergency care is provided. In military medicine and humanitarian care, delivering high quality and timely care to injured patients poses even greater and more complex challenges compared to civilian practice. Training and ongoing assessment pose substantial challenges for providing effective emergency medical care in military environments. Current best practice in medical training focuses on competency attainment, as opposed to mere knowledge or skill acquisition. Recurrent training (e.g. refresher courses) has been shown to be essential to maintain clinical competency. To optimize performance during emergency care in theater, novel refresher and/or “just-in-time” educational solutions are needed to enable “in-mission” emergency care training and assessment of service members in austere environments. In order for refresher training to be both efficient and effective, assessment of learners must play a significant role in the development and deployment of these educational strategies. The use of virtual reality (VR) for emergency care training has shown great promise. Recent research has shown that VR-based simulations are as efficient as training programs conducted in traditional simulation centers. The long-term goal of this project is to develop and validate a realistic mobile-based VR platform (CORE-Military) for frontline service members in austere environments, enabling effective just-in-time emergency care training and personalized assessment through AI-enabled learning analytics. In this proposal (phase 1), we will focus on a refresher tool for medical emergency recognition (e.g. early signs of deterioration) and initial response, as well as an embedded automated assessment engine to measure competency readiness and the need for educational remediation.