Medical Simulation and Information Sciences

The summary for the Medical Simulation and Information Sciences grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the Dept of the Army USAMRAA, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Medical Simulation and Information Sciences: Predictive Personality & Emotional State Performance Determinants for Training (PREEMPT) seeks the development of a proof-of-concept task performance assessment tool that incorporates personality and emotional state as determinant components to predict an individual’s performance and overall stress level under a wide range of potential combat casualty care scenarios, environments, and other stressful situations relevant to patient care. For this award, it is anticipated that the various components will be integrated for initial testing purposes in a laboratory setting to evaluate how the components work together. The FY16 JPC-1/MSIS PREEMPT is seeking research on two (2) of the several predictors of an individual’s performance: personality and emotional state. This knowledge can be used to:

• Assess an individual’s overall performance and stress levels during combat casualty care scenarios;
• Deconstruct overall performance into its personality and emotional state determinants and assess each;
• Combine the determinants to predict the person’s overall performance on known tasks, especially as it applies to performance under stress.

For the purposes of this announcement, personality will be defined as that set of non-physical characteristics which distinguishes one individual from another.

For the purposes of this announcement, emotional states are interpretations of complex states that best describe a person’s subjective response to a person, thing, or situation. Emotional states indirectly affect behavior.

The focus of the research should concentrate on those wishing to become military combat medics, corpsmen, pararescuemen, or special operations combat medics, but could consider other populations that are nearly equivalent. The pilot study should consider an individual’s performance compared against currently used standards for military entry within the respective area. If unable to use a standard for military entry, then the applicant should justify the proposed standard that the organization perceives as nearly equivalent, especially if there are data-driven outcomes for individuals who have trained using standards vs. those who have not. The assessment tool(s) could also potentially be used for sustainment of task performance and overall stress level assessment in refresher / sustainment courses.

For completeness, task difficulty needs to be described and defined and, if applicable, evaluation criteria provided with a description of the measurement tool. Task difficulty and conditions should be held constant in the proposed project.

In summary, an individual’s performance on a task in a specific environment at a moment in time can be specified in terms of the individual’s personality, emotional state, and task difficulty. This means that the observed task performance is the final common pathway of the complex interplay of the task determinants. The goal of this program is to identify the personality and emotional state determinants of individual performance in order to determine how to better select the right people for specific tasks in certain scenarios, environments, and stressful situations and how to improve individual performance across tasks and environments.