Development of Virtual Reality Tools for Assessment of Return-to-Duty Status following Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI)

The aims and opportunities of our adding on VR-Assessment-Modules (VRAM) to existing small arms training systems are focused on providing an easy-to-understand, ease-to-use rehabilitation interface customized for medical staff uses for assessments of return-to-duty status. This VRAM effort opportunistically integrates and exploits A2-T2/ODU ongoing rehabilitation, simulation&training, and next-generation multi-modal interface efforts funded by OSD, US Army, DARPA, and our own IR&D efforts with VA Hospitals and other TBI groups. VRAM enables our research team to evolve our current limited assessment features that are narrowly focused to a much wider context and user base. For example our current audio/visual assessments built-in to our Internet-Based Rehab product are narrowly focused on rehabilitation for mild to moderate TBI recovering warfighters to regain their “listening-skills”. We envision near-term evolution to much wider wholistic return-to-duty status assessments by modularly adding on to existing operational training systems used for military certifications and combining medically useful exercise instrumented-equipment already in use. We selected adding on VRAM first to small arms trainers based upon: warfighters’ current critical needs, availability, and our teams’ system architecture and software/hardware extensive expertise with the Engagement Skills Training (EST), FATS-Small-Arms-Training(SAT), and HLA/DIS tools for interfacing to multiple types and levels of simulations.