Enabling Pre-Hospital Documentation Via Spoken Language Understanding on the Modern Battlefield

Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (LM ATL) and the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research (USAISR) have been collaborating to improve methods of pre-hospital documentation. The collaboration is focused on creating a pre-hospital documentation grammar and spoken natural language understanding capability to support a hands-free and eyes-free interaction paradigm. This interaction paradigm will minimize the impact on the field medic during treatment of patients in stressful combat situations. The MediTRA-PH (Medical Treatment and Reporting Assistant: Pre-Hospital) prototype is a proof-of-concept of this approach. This paper presents the user-focused concept of operations for MediTRAPH, the design and development cycles undertaken and preliminary evaluation results in terms of recognition accuracy and user satisfaction.