Friday, July 17, 2009

Inside Education & Training

Simulation training finds new applications in life-and-death situations

By Dann Anthony Maurno, Special to Mass High Tech

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Simulation training is meant to re-create a hands-on experience, but is it real enough for life-and-death situations?

Increasingly, yes. At Logan International Airport, trainee air-traffic controllers guide passenger jets through blinding sleet, in the first week of July. They are at the new Federal Aviation Administration training center at Logan, which opened June 30. The center is part of a $48 million FAA contract, which it awarded to Adacel Systems of Orlando, Fla., a longtime supplier to the world’s airports and militaries.

“The idea is to speed up training and replace OJT (on-the-job training) to the greatest extent possible,” said Adacel director of product management Tom Evers. “There are a lot of controller shortage problems, worldwide, owing to retirement.”

The more realistic simulations cut more than a quarter of the training time and eliminate some real inefficiencies; on-the-job training required two people to do one job: the instructor and trainee. And, the person doing the job — a highly critical one — was still an amateur.

The military pioneered simulations, particularly for flight training — one of the few instances wherein, for a long time, the expense of computer simulations was cost-justified. Now it is affordable, and realistic enough, for ground training. As Roger Smith, CTO of the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training & Instrumentation (PEO STI) described, “Soldiers were used to static paintings and drawings. It wasn’t until the late ‘80s that computers were capable of drawing 3-D scenes.”

Dynamics Research Corp. of Andover was integral in designing the newest close combat tactical trainer (CCTT), to train soldiers in combat vehicles. DRC worked directly with soldiers in numerous models of combat vehicles to focus the CCTT on the functions that soldiers actually use in battle.

“It used to be, I could create one suite (of a simulation), and now we can create 100 suites for the same money,” said Smith. “We can go down to Best Buy and fill up a pickup truck with big-screen projectors and high-end machines with four processing cores and a graphics card with gigabytes of RAM. As a result, the military has gotten more and more into simulation. It prefers simulation,” for its cost-effectiveness and portability.

These may not be the grand-scale re-enactments of field war games, but without computerized simulation, “recruits wouldn’t get the opportunity to make decisions on their own,” said Bruce Roberts, a lead scientist with Cambridge-based BBN Technologies. “They pick up information and the ability to behave and react in a virtual world, which they’re then able to replicate in a real physical space.”

BBN’s Roberts is one of the principal investigators on an Office of Naval Research project, which incorporates game-based training into damage control response to floods, fires and mass casualties. Game-based simulation and BBN voice-recognition technology are particularly suited to modern warfare, which requires nontraditional combat skills, such as cultural dynamics. BBN is creating military training modules that, for example, allow multiple players to interact with Afghani townspeople, with realistic responses (both positive and negative) from the virtual Afghanis.

Simulation, reality side-by-side
What simulation further allows is enhancement of the real world, and then work alongside it. Parametric Technology Corp. of Needham produces life cycle management and 3-D CAD solutions; but increasingly, its client base uses the products to run real-time simulations where cameras are not practical — like inside nuclear reactors.

The National Ignition Facility project under way at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is said to be the world’s largest laser, and is “a very complex piece of machinery,” according to PTC product manager of visualization products Mike Rygol. “They make very heavy use of our Mockup product to rehearse manipulating the test environment and number of lasers.” Similarly, a European nuclear power station uses Mockup to rehearse refit operations, and reduced refits from seven days to five, saving $8 million in down time.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., does not distinguish simulation from reality;  its 18-bed, 8,000-square-foot Patient Safety Training Center “sits in actual clinical space,” said Dr. George Blike, who is both a quality and patient safety officer at the hospital. Because practically everyone is involved with patient care, everyone from surgeons to chaplains trains in the laboratory.

“Containing superbugs depends on our housekeeping having excellent practices of cleaning high-touch areas on beds and equipment between use. So every surface that exists in the hospital exists in the center, and housekeeping trains new hires in the center,” said Blike.

 “Good care pays. Preventable infections present a great deal of waste,” says Blike. “If a patient stays an additional five days due to an infection, and the average stay of a hip replacement is 3.6 days, we could have put another patient in that bed. If we drop the length of stay by complication avoidance by one percent (per year), that’s $600,000 on our margin, which we can reinvest in a new CAT scanner.”

Physicians and nurses train with “Stan,” short for “Standard Man,” a computer-model-driven, full-sized mannequin that speaks, breathes, has a heartbeat and pulse, and ultimately lives or dies depending on the treatment he gets. The mannequin, from Australian company METI, is designed to accurately mirror human responses to such procedures as CPR, intravenous medication, intubation, ventilation and catheterization.

Smith of the Army’s PEO STI said, “We prefer to teach with the simulator, rather than the real vehicle, because of the cost and safety issues. But in the civilian work force, it should be possible to do the same, with a forklift operator in a warehouse, or a crane operator at a dock offloading a big ship. That kind of ubiquity (in the private sector) is not happening much — the closest I see is in commercial airline pilots. We just don’t see it going into other industries. I’d like to see it go there.”

 

Dann Anthony Maurno is a freelance writer in Salem.