Immersive Medical Training on Display at I/ITSEC

SIMETRI will present its Multi Modal Medical Training System (M3TS) at the Army Simulation and Training Technology Center’s booth during the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida, from 2-5 December. M3TS is a mobile, immersive training system designed for care-under-fire scenarios, featuring components such as a mixed reality headset, speakers for 3D audio, an air rifle version of the M4 carbine, and haptic technology.

The M3TS system provides trainees with hands-on experience in a realistic setting. The scenario involves interacting with a physical manikin that has lost a limb, requiring participants to apply a tourniquet while responding to a virtual enemy.

“We want people to touch and feel real things,” said Darin Hughes, Ph.D., SIMETRI’s lead software engineer. “Our scenario involves a physical manikin that has lost a limb, and participants put a tourniquet on it. We want people doing that with their actual hands for a realistic training experience, as well as moving a physical manikin.”

Hughes emphasized that M3TS requires trainees to make decisions throughout the scenario that involve going back and forth from providing care to a physical manikin, to returning fire against a virtual enemy, as circumstances evolve.

“It’s a big advantage, because you’re actually going through the motions you’d go through in real life due to the mixed reality applications that M3TS provides – which a lot of purely virtual simulations fail to do,” Hughes said. “Haptic gloves can potentially even lead to negative training because certain virtual actions just don’t feel like they do in real life.”

Hughes said M3TS also improves warfighter readiness by helping soldiers psychologically prepare, not only for traditional combat scenarios, but other situations they might not expect, particularly in a gender-integrated military.

“The M3TS manikin is a female manikin that has breasts [and other gender-specific characteristics],” Hughes said. “Research has indicated that men, and even some women, are much more hesitant to do full body searches for entry wounds and exit wounds when it comes to areas like the breasts. That is another area we train and evaluate [in addition to] hasty tourniquet application and other decision-making processes for care under fire.”

M3TS also offers valuable data-tracking features, such as how many times trainees have fired at the enemy, if trainees have been shot, and how long it took them to go from engaging the enemy to tending to the casualty.

The system tracks detailed metrics, including tourniquet pressure data and engagement times, which evaluators can use to assess performance. The latest version of M3TS can share data with third-party simulations, enhancing the training experience and supporting additional care or medevac procedures.

Hughes said that M3TS began as a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) phase I project that was “pretty limited in scope.” Since it entered phase II, SIMETRI has improved the mixed reality images and field of view in its headsets with a video pass-through, head-mounted display, which uses cameras to blend virtual images that a trainee sees simultaneously with the real world. Such refinements provide for a more immersive environment, and make it possible to use the processing power of modern gaming computers.