Research platforms aim to better support military personnel in high-stress environments

Operational medicine is a common theme in Dr. Jeff Phillips’ research.

His expertise in the effect of common aviation stressors (i.e. hypoxia) on operator performance dates back decades. In this newest iteration of his work, Phillips and his team are researching ways to support military operations and maximize human potential in extreme environments.

The goal of a servicemember making better decisions and reacting faster in a challenging scenario calls for a new generation of psychometric tests that gather human performance metrics.

Two recent projects Phillips has led at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) have shown promise to elicit and track the data needed to make the next generation of warfighters safer and better able to perform tasks with immense physical and cognitive demands in extreme environments.

“What we’re doing here is trying to make psychometric tools that fit the bill for these specific stressors and states that we’re interested in,” Phillips says. “The traditional battery of psychometric tests do not measure tasks that are germane to flying or to the real-world demands that special operations ground forces encounter.”

Take for example, hypoxia.

“If I expose you to 25,000 feet or the equivalent barometric pressure, I have three to five minutes to evaluate you,” Phillips says. “We have scores of psychometric tools, but most of them are 10 to 20 minutes long and they’re intended to measure traits, consistent aspects of human behavior — like personality, as opposed to transient states — like hypoxia, motion sickness, or fatigue.”

Tracking aviators’ stressors

The U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine developed the Cognitive Assessment of Aviation Performance and Evaluation of State (CAAPES) as a psychometric tool to track the effects of environmental stressors on aviators.

CAAPES began as part of the Air Force’s efforts to understand instances where aviators fell like they were deprived of oxygen without obvious physical or mechanical cause. These episodes can be caused by hypoxia, hypocapnia, fatigue, gravity-induced loss of consciousness, spatial disorientation and dehydration.

IHMC has used CAAPES has filled in several gaps, including developing a new way to measure tracking performance in a shorter time intervals, updating graphics, and improved capture performance reliability.

This video-game like evaluation platform sets a baseline for cognitive function by having users track targets, shoot at them while simultaneously performing three other sub tasks. Using the platform after a subconcussive brain injury could help note changes in cognitive function, as one example for a use-case.

IHMC has used CAAPES to test performance under various stressors, including hypoxia, dehydration, and hypercapnia. The results show that CAAPES can track if performance impacts are the result of stress alone or if it is the result of an interaction between stress and workload.

That’s a distinction that is crucial for personalizing training and improving aviators’ tolerance of high-G stress circumstances.

“The UPE crisis is no longer a crisis,” Phillips says. “We’ve done a lot of investigations. We’ve concluded that it’s probably safer now to be a fighter pilot than ever before. But we’re also pushing the limits of human physiology more now than ever before because we’re going higher and at a faster ascent rate. Understanding more about this is key to continue to innovate in pilot safety.”

Subhead: Tracking demands on ground forces

The Cognitive Enhancement Resources for Battlefield Resiliency and Optimization (CEREBRO) aims to improve how cognitive performance and marksmanship are assessed and trained.

It is aimed at Special Operations Command ground forces.

“These operators are very good at what they do,” Phillips says. “The U.S. military spends millions on each guy before they are in their first firefight. They try to train them to automate everything that they need to do to make decisions, but there’s just no real way to predict how that person will react when it’s a real situation until you are in the situation.”

Meanwhile, there grew a desire to develop better metrics that could be used to track the effects of subconcussive brain injuries in a more real-world testing environment.

The CEREBRO platform is born of those twin tracks.

IHMC is a subcontractor for the project to BAE Systems Space and Mission Systems Inc. Year one saw the IHMC team focus on designing the methodology and the scenario of the test.

The test tasks were developed on an immersive shoot simulation environment with particular focus on stimulus timing, response capture, and task logic. The goal is to more closely mimic the kind of environment in which military personnel are expected to perform.

Year two is about refining those methodologies with layers of increasing complexity, including developing a trail-making task for the virtual platform as well as shoot-don’t shoot scenarios in challenging visual environments.

One of the CEREBRO scenarios could mimic, for example, the view as a servicemember stands watch over a base keeping an eye out for a signal or stimulus coming from a predefined area of interest in the field of view.

“If you see a red dot in this area, you have to make sure they’re not trying to sneak drones through this pass right here,” Phillips says. “So if you see a red dot, rules of engagement require a human in the loop to confirm a kill shot within one half a second before a missile hits the base.

In the old paradigm, you had to present a stimulus and it had to be missed to get a negative score, Phillips says. “But now I have an eye tracking system and an area of interest that I can marry that to, and I can measure visual discipline and tell if you’re looking where you’re supposed to look or not,” he says.

This vigilance concept is big across the human problem space, he says. It is not difficult to imagine many situations where you just have somebody awaiting a critical signal while overlooking a field crowded with visual stimuli.

“We hope that over time we can train vigilance,” Phillips says. “It can be trained as kind of a meditation where you use the task itself as an anchor.”

 

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