APTIMA INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: DHP13-002

Description

Although great strides have been made in the development of simulators for training technical and teamwork skills, substantially less progress has been made with regard to their assessment. Typically, skills and performance are assessed by an expert observer using a Likert-type rating scale with anchors ranging from low to high. However, such methods are extremely coarse, and often provide little insight into the underlying causes of success or failure. What is needed are much more fine-grained, unobtrusive, and real-time measures of individual and team states such as cognitive load (CL), which can supplement expert observer ratings to provide a more holistic assessment of individual and team performance. By automatically alerting instructors to changes in CL, instructors can dynamically modify training scenarios on-the-fly, thereby ensuring that learners remain within the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) at all times. Further, by integrating CL measures during the post-training After Action Review (AAR), instructors and learners will gain a better understanding into the causes of effective and ineffective performance. With this in mind, Aptima proposes to extend, harden, and commercialize ACLAMATE, our real-time CL assessment, alerting, and visualization tool.