Augmented Reality Emerges as Key Tool for Military Medical Training.

• Author: Harper, Jon

Having well-trained medics and other military health care professionals can mean the difference between life and death for U.S. service members. That's why the Pentagon is eyeing augmented reality as a simulation tool to help them sharpen their skills.

Last year, the University of Miami's Gordon Center for Simulation and Innovation in Medical Education conducted a four-month study funded by the Defense Health Agency to examine the effectiveness of teletraining that leverages AR.

"The background to this is that the DoD is faced with really the same challenges that we all are in health care, which is not enough faculty to be able to train all the people that need to be trained," said Dr. Ivette Motola, a specialist in emergency medicine with the University of Miami Health System. "And so it was in some ways a proof of concept--can we do this effectively remotely?"

The study involved about 30 participants including personnel from the Army Trauma Training Detachment.

The study examined whether teletraining with augmented reality could be used to teach a new, complex procedure to a group of paramedics, Motola said. The AR technology that was used was developed by ArchieMD, a Boca Raton, Florida-based company that provides educational training products within the health sciences.

"We put [trainers and trainees] in two different places and used telemedicine along with a manikin and augmented reality... imagery for the faculty member to teach the paramedic how to put in a chest tube," Motola explained in an interview.

A tube thoracostomy involves placing a hollow plastic tube between the ribs and into the chest cavity to drain air, blood or other fluids from around the lungs--a procedure that could be required to save the life of a wounded service member.

"For this one, it was a projector over the manikin, and then they had a screen in front of them where they could see the instructor and then also see the manikin with the superimposed anatomy and the step-by-step procedure components," she said. "Basically they could see the manikin plus the anatomy [with AR imagery] and all of the layers they were going through together."

"It's like they have X-ray vision," Dr. Ross Scalese, director of educational technology development at the Gordon Center and a former Air Force flight surgeon, said of the students using the technology.

The feedback from participants was positive, Motola said.

"The features the learners found most useful were the ability to...