Situation Awareness Assessment Tools for Network Enabled Command and Control Field Evaluations

Given the complexity of current military operations, a critical need exists for tools to objectively and reliably assess warfighter situation awareness (SA), particularly in the challenging environments of network centric warfare. The ability to validly quantify warfighter SA offers significant flexibility and diagnosticity to researchers and provides a means by which to evaluate the utility of system designs, training methods, support structures, and task environments to effectively support warfighter SA. Accordingly, our overall goal for this Army SBIR project is to design and develop our Metrics of Global Assessment and Situation Awareness (MEGA SA) system to enable researchers to objectively measure and analyze both individual and team SA in real-time across a variety of Army command and control (C2) system evaluations. Rather than rely on a single technique or metric, we adopt a multi-faceted approach to SA measurement to increase the sensitivity and diagnosticity of the overall assessment and create a more robust and flexible tool for research and field applications. The product of this Phase II research will be an easy-to-use menu-based tool for real-time SA analysis of individuals and teams, applicable to a broad range of military and non-military domains.