Augmented Reality for Army Medics in New Plan

A soldier takes a Sharpie and scribbles his blood type onto the back of his helmet, before he heads into combat. Later, injured and unconscious on the battlefield, that “O+” is all the health information a medical crew has to go on. But not for long. If the Army gets its way, those EMT’s might be able to read full patient medical records off a screen right in front of their eyes.

A recent solicitation for small businesses calls for a brand new pair of “Battlefield Medical Situational Awareness Goggles,” which would allow battlefield medics to receive and document every emergency with a see-through display mounted to their head. Information overlaid onto their field of view would be accessible at all times, no matter where they were looking.

Pilots have used heads-up displays to keep their eyes off their instruments for over half a century. But since then the displays have popped up in all sorts of contexts, from driving cars to riding bikes to controlling robots to playing games to just walking around town. They’ve even been proposed for other members of the medical community – anesthesiologists could use them to monitor a patient’s vital signs, and surgeons could use them to view exactly where to cut.

So it makes sense that they could be useful on the battlefield. At all times, emergency response teams need to have complete and accurate information about the where, what, and what-next of any particular situation. This situational awareness could improve if those facts were superimposed onto their view of the world.

Head-gear in place, combat medics and EMT’s could immediately pull up clinical information from the Medic training school in San Antonio, getting real-time assistance for life-saving procedures. Using a voice-activated system, they would be able to call up all the medical records and notes for a patient in trouble. During and after any procedure, they would be able to document exactly what kinds of care that patient received. The goggles would be capable of exchanging text, images, and data with anyone else on the battlefield, and eventually could be hooked up to GPS sensors to navigate and locate injured combatants. Much of that information exists already, in wearable computer form. The trick is to shrink it all down to sit on a nose.

Now, nobody wants a be-goggled doctor caught up reading patient notes in the middle of performing a life-saving operation. Under fire or in a rush, medics might just have to rely on old-fashioned eyesight to do the best job they can. But the Army emphasizes that even in these extreme situations, heads-up display goggles could be useful for preparation beforehand and documentation afterward.

The future will be augmented reality. And Army medics want in