Air Force technology poised to dramatically improve civilian emergency management operations

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio – Behind the scenes at a training exercise several years ago, researchers from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) asked air combat commanders to outline their biggest challenges. By far, commanders expressed the most concern over confusion caused by large amounts of radio traffic. During intense operations, many voice transmissions prompted a request to repeat and much of what was said simply got lost. Envisioning an opportunity, researchers went back to the 711th Human Performance Wing at AFRL to take a closer look at how the human mind processes information and why voice communications become garbled in a headset. That spawned work on a software tool to capture and organize voice communications, which has since been patented by AFRL as multi-modal communication (MMC) spatial audio separation and visual transcription. “The biggest problem with emergency management is the confusion as messages get mixed, messages step on each other,” said Bob Lee, who served as a branch chief at AFRL during the initial development of MMC and is currently open innovation project manager at Wright Brothers Institute in Dayton, Ohio. “Spatially separating them allows you to get back to a natural interface. Critical information is more likely to be found.” While still being evaluated for Air Force use, MMC is now positioned to improve emergency management operations in the civilian world as Dayton-based GlobalFlyte signed a Patent ...
Source: JEMS: Journal of Emergency Medical Services News - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Communications & Dispatch Industry News Source Type: news