APTIMA INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: OSD10-CR3

Description

Expert, or resilient, teams have a deep and shared understanding of the situation, their own roles, and those of team members. This allows them to anticipate needs and coordinate implicitly, facilitating quicker decision-making. While these behaviors are critical to submarine tactical teams, they are not often explicitly emphasized within the existing training system. Largely, these non-technical behaviors are learned implicitly through experience in training or at sea. Aptima proposes to develop a team training application capable of unobtrusively measuring the team behaviors that are most critical to resilient submarine teams. Objective and reliable behavior metrics will be developed and validated using the communication and interaction data captured during training events. These metrics will be visualized within a tailored user interface, accessible by instructors and teams, to facilitate the training experience. Metrics will provide instructors and teams with descriptive and prescriptive feedback, along with applicable training recommendations, relevant to the team practices of interest, enabling online team assessment, targeted coaching interventions, and more productive debriefs. As a result, it is expected that the Team-based Advanced Resilience Accelerator will speed the development of the resilient team skills that make an expert team, while minimizing the demand on already over-stretched instructors.