Viyant Hazmat Skilled Support Personnel Just in Place Performance Support

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Skilled Support Personnel (SSP) are essential to site recovery, yet they are often under-trained in hazmat response and may lack knowledge of how to cope with specific incidents. Poor training and rusty skills lead to injury to themselves and others, as well as making the overall situation worse. Beyond full instructional courses, a continuum of training and real-time performance support is needed to enable these crews to work effectively. Mini-course modules for enr oute and onsite training, on-the-job performance aids and simple checklists, and access to live expert mentors who support decision making or deliver mini lesson Just-in-Place(r) should all have a place in this training and performance support package. Jus t-in-Place(r) is our proprietary approach to delivering content and services, tied to context relevant factors such as: time, location, skills, tasks and who or what is nearby. The project team will meet this need by building the Viyant Hazmat Skilled Supp ort Personnel Just in Place Performance Support System (Viyant Hazmat) in collaboration with established hazmat training organizations and service providers. Viyant Hazmat will enable mobile Just-in-Place training materials, performance aids, and checklist s to be accessed at the job site and permit real-time collaboration with hazmat and medical experts at remote locations. Not only will SSPs be able to talk directly with experts, the experts' situational understanding will be increased by using web collabo ration tools allowing the onsite SSP to send live images and video to remotely located experts. Viyant Hazmat comprises an integrated suite of computer hardware, ranging from wearable computers to cell phones, wireless communications, mixed reality softwar e tools, content authoring tools, administration tools and support services that are optimized for improving safety and effective decision making. The specific target audience for this Phase I effort is demolition crews at Superfund, brownfields and disast er sites. Other hazmat audiences will be addressed during commercialization. Viyant Hazmat will be built on the Company's Viyant(tm) Standard Edition platform, which is currently being used to facilitate equipment repair, maintenance and installation train ing and operations for technicians at a distance. Our research will include: 1) prototyping the Viyant Hazmat software system; 2) conducting system usability and ergonomics testing with demolition workers with and without personal protective equipment; 3) developing sample mini training modules, performance aids and checklists based on existing training materials from partner service providers; 4) testing learning effectiveness of incident-specific training materials; and 5) field testing the system.