News Article

Cincinnati startup releases a way to train combat medics using augmented reality
Date: Apr 09, 2018
Author: Andy Brownfield
Source: bizjournals ( click here to go to the source)

Featured firm in this article: Unveil LLC of Cincinnati, OH



An augmented reality system from a Cincinnati startup is helping train combat medics.

A Cincinnati startup has come up with a way to use augmented reality to train candidates for one of the toughest jobs out there: combat medicine.

Unveil LLC, working out of the HCDC Business Center in Norwood, launched its Virtual Patient Immersive Trainer (VPIT) on March 15, and orders will begin shipping out in June. It's a program that helps combat medics in training get a better grasp of the life-or-death work they'll be doing in the field.

First, let's establish a working vocabulary to understand this technology.

Augmented reality is different from virtual reality. The latter operates by having someone put on a headset, which takes them to a different place, either real or imagined, that has no bearing on where the user is. That could mean putting on a headset and being transported to the Congo in a gorilla preserve or into the middle of a battle in outer space.

Augmented reality is more grounded in, well, reality. It's used in many smartphone cameras to put computer-generated creations into a room you're currently viewing through your smartphone's camera. IKEA has an app that uses augmented reality through which users can use their smartphone camera to place and move a virtual representation of, say, a sofa and experiment with different positions or placements in the room where they're currently standing. Augmented reality augments your current reality by placing digital things into it.

Here's how it impacts combat medicine:

In the 1990s the armed forces began training medics to treat extreme hemorrhaging, tension pneumothorax (air buildup in the chest due to a punctured lung) and airway obstructions.

Unveil, the augmented reality company out of Cincinnati, is working with a Crestwood, Ky., company called Innovative Tactical Training Solutions (ITTS) to aid that training. ITTS' technology is impressive enough on its own. The Kentucky company manufactures a mechanical mannequin that simulates battlefield injuries and allows medics-in-training to address and treat them without anyone's life at stake.

ITTS' mannequin can breathe, has a pulse and can bleed. Limbs can be swapped to simulate explosion, blade or gunshot damage. Trainees can apply tourniquets and bandages, IVs or do a cricothyroidotomy to open a blocked or collapsed airway.

But the mannequins are not good at other things, like showing how skin can become pallid after an injury, the progression of facial swelling, blood pooling in certain areas of the skin or how blood can seep through a bandage if it is incorrectly applied.

Unveil's VPIT does that.

The VPIT is essentially an app that works in conjunction with Microsoft's HoloLens. The HoloLens is a head-mounted device that looks like a bulky set of eyewear. It has cameras that do a 3-D scan of a room and can map out things like the floor, walls and objects. It can project images onto objects it has mapped in 3-D, including objects like ITTS' mannequin.

Unveil's VPIT augments the ITTS mannequin by projecting medically accurate symptoms for a variety of combat injuries onto the mannequin to make it more realistic and easier to see how the injuries would present in real life.

"All the combat medics in the military don't have the opportunity to go on ride-alongs," Unveil co-founder Laura Militello told me. "That's where augmented reality comes in."
The Unveil augmented reality system overlays a virtual representation of a combat injury patient over a mannequin.
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The Unveil augmented reality system overlays a virtual representation of a combat injury patient over a mannequin.

Provided

Militello has a background in cognitive psychology and human factors and has spent most of her career studying how people make decisions under stress. She and Unveil co-founder and CEO Steve Wolf have known each other for about 30 years and worked together in the past.

Wolf is a former Procter & Gamble research manager who went on to become the chief information officer of Bridge Worldwide, which became Possible. That's where he came into contact with John Hendricks, Unveil co-founder and vice president of product development, who was a designer with Possible and, as Wolf put it, gave the agency the chops to do cutting edge visualization for products.

A fourth co-founder, Oliver Smith, has more than a decade of experience as an Air Force pararescueman and informed Unveil's direction in developing the training program as well as connections to ITTS.

Unveil's VPIT can show the progression of, say, blunt force trauma on the ribcage from initial injury through death. It can portray things the mannequin can't. Hendricks pointed one of those out to me while I tried it on.

"See the agonal breathing near the stomach? It's diaphragmatic motion on the stomach every six to eight seconds," he said. "That's the reptilian section of the brain telling the body to breathe even though the body can't. It's something the mannequin can't do but the augmented reality can."

The VPIT provides the curriculum to train combat medics. It tracks the user's gaze so the instructor can tell whether the student is looking for and recognizing all of the correct symptoms and addressing them. As treatments, like a tourniquet, are applied to the mannequin, virtual representations of those show up on the headset as well.
The Unveil app allows trainers to make sure students are looking at and recognizing all of the correct symptoms.
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The Unveil app allows trainers to make sure students are looking at and recognizing all of the correct symptoms.

Provided

ITTS is selling Unveil's VPIT alongside its mannequins, and the revenue from that will be used to help with development of a hospital-based version to train doctors.

In the meantime, it completed a six-month Phase 1 government research grant in conjunction with the Ohio State University to test the efficacy of the technology and it's applying for a Phase 2 grant that will keep the startup funded for another two years.