ADAPT-MD: A Dynamic Adaptive Training System For Simulation-based Medical Training

Training military medical personnel to maintain readiness for medical emergencies and combat-related operations is a critical problem. Distance learning solutions are required for providing effective training while minimizing the time away from theimportant peacetime duty of providing quality medical care to military personnel. Since medical emergencies are unexpected, it is important to dynamically generate customized courses to address the particular emergency. It is also important to address theprecise learning needs of the medical team being trained.This proposal describes ADAPT-MD, a simulation-based Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for delivering personalized training to medical teams. Much like human instructors, ITSs dynamically assess and diagnose students' knowledge and skill levels andprovide training that is customized to the students' learning needs. Using innovative simulation and assessment techniques, ADAPT-MD provides adaptive, targeted instruction to individuals and teams. It is based on the SCORM standard. It includes anauthoring tool for specifying content modules, domain knowledge, and instructional techniques. Phase I laid the foundations for Phase II in terms of defining user requirements, application design and a prototype to demonstrate feasibility. Phase II willdevelop a fully-functional framework and apply it to the domain of training for providers of hyperbaric treatment. The ITS framework developed at the end Phase II can be applied to other medical training domains. The need for quality medical training technology is quite substantial, within and outside the military. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports,there are about 6 million healthcare practitioners and technicians in the country. There are about 6000 hospitals and 33,000 nursing and personal care facilities in the United States alone. The proposed Phase II effort will help us establish the usefulnessof simulator-based ITS for medical training and so facilitate our marketing efforts with non-government medical groups. We also have close contacts with developers' high-fidelity simulators for medical training. We will explore avenues of collaboratingwith them to commercialize the Adapt-MD framework.