Predicting Cognitive Performance of Deploying Health Teams

The deployment of geographically dispersed military medical teams requires personnel to be prepared to manage all threats and employ all contingencies. Currently, these medical teams and their missions are comprised of individuals who differ in competencyskill levels within the field of medicine as well as allied fields of intelligence, communication, and security across domains of air, land, sea and space. These rapidly generated teams may originate from different geographical locations and variedoperational missions. Further, individual team members are likely unfamiliar with each other, have limited knowledge of the deployment location, and are not trained in the specifics of the tasks to be performed. It is essential that cognitive assessmentof mission readiness begin at initiation of the assignment and continue through arrival in the theater of operation. This effort is to design and develop unobtrusive techniques and methodologies to predict individual and team readiness to deploy andperform critical mission objectives. We will investigate methodologies and techniques that hold promise to non-invasively measure the cognitive capability of an individual to comprehend and carry out medical mission requirements under varying threats andcontingencies, and use these measures to predict the cognitive readiness of individuals and teams for deployment.