MAVEN: Mnemonic Associative Vocabulary for Emergency Needs

All Soldiers are required to master 17 First Aid procedures in basic training. These 17 procedures are described in 99 pages of the Soldiers’ Manual of Common Tasks. To even the best student, recall of these exact procedures in a stressful situation would be challenging. This proposal outlines a research and development program to develop an iconic language of visual mnemonics. This iconic language will be integrated into first aid training to better enable Soldiers to encode the 17 procedures, and the icons will be printed on “flash cards” that Soldiers can carry with them into battle to serve as reminders of the procedures. Aptima, working with its partner, Wexford, will identify hierarchical clusters of information within those 99 pages. For each identified cluster, an aspect of a mnemonic will be designed to create an iconic language. These aspects will be combined to create visual mnemonics for each procedure. These mnemonics will then be embedded into the existing first aid training program and printed on flash cards. In combination this will improve the effectiveness of the first aid training Soldiers receive as well as improve recall of procedures in an emergency situation.