Medical Augmented Reality for Combat Casualty Care (MARC)

Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) is essential for the Department of Defense during force-on-force engagements, but training is currently lacking. While traditional classroom instruction and high-fidelity simulation center training are important, they fail to provide practice in a larger exercise under field conditions in which the realities of combat impact medical treatment. Furthermore, though force-on-force live training events provide controlled settings in which soldiers experience simulated real-world scenarios, they focus on wartime mission-essential task lists and combat operations that are designed to increase collective unit proficiencies while providing only rudimentary TCCC training. Consequently, combat lifesavers and combat medics can only notionally reenact TCCC medical procedures to address common battlefield injuries on other soldiers, who are healthy untrained surrogate patients. With the focus on mission training, there is less regard for individual medical skills training. To address these requirements, we propose to design and demonstrate a system to provide Medical Augmented Reality for Combat Casualty Care (MARC). MARC provides in-situ tactical combat casualty care training and assessment during live force-on-force training events through the application of modern augmented reality (AR) technologies.