Severe trauma injuries create major challenges for front line military medical personnel. Many trained medical personnel are not psychologically prepared to encounter or treat severe wartime traumatic injuries. Current technologies for simulating severe trauma lack the realism and clinical accuracy necessary to provide fully immersive training experience for combat medical situations in a training environment.

The Virtual Reality Medical Center (VRMC) developed the Injury Creation Science (ICS) wearable prosthetic wounds in support of the Severe Trauma Simulation Army Technology Objective (ATO) managed by the Research Development and Engineering Command Simulation & Training Technology Center (RDECOM STTC). The mission of the ATO is to research and develop innovative technologies to realistically simulate the look, feel and smell of severe trauma to prepare medics, combat lifesavers and Soldiers to deal with injuries encountered on the battlefield. The prototype prosthetic wounds developed under this effort realistically simulate a number of battlefield injuries such as amputations, eviscerations, blast injuries, penetrations and burns.

This paper will discuss in detail how training requirements and the student's need to master a variety of procedural skills impacted the design of the ICS Injury Simulation Kits. The paper will also describe the criteria used to develop the overall design, as well as, the identification of specific injuries. In addition, the paper will discuss how subject matter expertise was utilized to develop metrics and processes used to evaluate the overall benefits of the program. Finally, the results from user tests and lessons learned from the development and implementation of this project will be discussed.