Design Interactive, Inc. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF211-CSO1

Description

The expansion of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies presents the USAF with a remarkable opportunity to make fundamental changes to how pilots and aircrews are trained. Such changes could not only save the USAF millions of dollars in annual fuel and maintenance costs, but they could also accelerate USAF mission readiness and rapid, effective decision making. While this explosion of technology supports realizing readiness gains, the gains will not occur automatically. It is crucial that emerging training technologies be paired with instructional technologies so that performance can be captured, associated to root causes, and debriefed in a way that offers personalized, actionable feedback. DI has developed ScreenADAPT®, a performance assessment and debriefing technology utilizing advances in AI, data visualization, and human machine teaming resulting in up to 45% performance improvement gains. While ScreenADAPT® was developed to meet the specific needs of aviation security professionals conducting inspections of passenger baggage, the core learning science principles and the auto-adaptive diagnostic framework are extensible to other domains, such as pilot and aircrew training. Leverage the eight years of research and development from ScreenADAPT®’s, the proposed AirADAPT tool is expected to improve USAF human performance by supporting consistent, standardized assessment, reducing bias and demand on the human instructor, and increasing training capacity and performance tracking enterprise wide. This solution will integrate research-based learning techniques with a signature adaptive performance algorithm to enable a comprehensive picture of a trainee’s knowledge, skills, and cognitive state. AirADAPT will provide the emerging ecosystem of USAF virtual, augmented, and mixed reality training solutions with a single best technology for conducting performance evaluation and accelerating readiness.