Charles River Analytics Inc., developer of intelligent systems solutions, has received additional funding from the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command to build our Extensible Field and Evacuation Care Training in a Virtual Environment (EFECTIVE) system. EFECTIVE will be the Department of Defense’s first comprehensive system to train military personnel on medical care and logistics in austere, far-forward environments. The two-year EFECTIVE follow-on contract is valued at $1 million.

“The Department of Defense recognizes the need for training systems that prepare personnel in the military medical operation to perform their roles in severely degraded, prolonged field and en-route care settings,” said Benjamin Bauchwitz, Scientist at Charles River Analytics and Principal Investigator on the EFECTIVE effort. “Our EFECTIVE system delivers the first virtual environment to train and assess these critical skills.”

Because future contested theaters of war are constantly evolving, EFECTIVE uses our Methodology for Annotating Skill Trees (MAST) framework to capture important and generalizable decision-making themes based on existing resources and the past experience of military medical personnel. The simulation then automatically assesses trainee proficiency against objective performance metrics linked to these skills. MAST has been previously used to successfully model skills for a variety of domains, including evolving and challenging environments that medical military personnel might face.

The EFECTIVE system furthers our growing portfolio of efforts in healthcare support and training.

This work is supported by the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command under Contract No.W81XWH-19-C-0044. The views, opinions and/or findings contained in this report are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy or decision unless so designated by other documentation.