Funding Status:
Active - Currently funded and in progress
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Procurement Mechanism(s):
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Aims:
Traditional emergency training practices are focused on performance outcomes, research into countermeasures should investigate stress-training techniques for acute stress in life-threatening situations to prevent adverse behavior and performance degradation. Recent advances in virtual reality (VR) environments provide the capability to simulate stressors over multiple sessions in a realistic task setting, until realistic stress levels are achieved. A virtual reality training system that is able to adapt based on the crew member's stress response may help foster resilience. By measuring participant's physiological and performance metrics, the adaptive system would allow graduated exposure of stress levels within a suitable biometric and performance ranges. Activating the stress response, while simultaneously assuring the crew member is not overwhelmed, may facilitate inoculation to the stress. Further, the automated training would be beneficial during long duration missions where ground support and training resources are limited or unavailable. This research aims at measuring physiological stress response and in-training performance, while evaluating adaptation rules and triggers. By using stress training to familiarize and prepare crew members for future stressors, a reduced state of anxiety and increased cognitive resources enabling enhanced performance are expected. Aims include:
1. Identify components and principles that contribute to the stress in a microgravity environment;
2. Evaluate formal objective methods to measure and adapt for baseline chronic and acute stress, in-training performance, psychological stress response, lapse in judgment, and other errors during the adaptive stress training;
3. Develop a prototype for graduated stress training by evaluating adaptation rules, triggers, other state assessment in combination with biometric feedback;
4. Conduct a proof-of-concept of the training for hazardous conditions through implementation of the training on emergency procedures for the NASA International Space Station (ISS) with subsequent testing of the training in a full-scale virtual-reality ISS’ simulations; and
5. Establish guidelines for implementation of the graduated stress.
The following supplemental aims were added:
1S. Validate a real-time measure of acute stress based on physiological measures.
2S. Evaluate a third stress group in the closed-loop virtual stress training experiment.