Large-scale military exercises involving force-on-force engagements provide a valuable opportunity to train collectively in realistic battlefield conditions. Unfortunately, battlefield medicine and casualty response have often been excluded due to the burden inherent in their implementation. To date, including medical activities in these training events has required medical manikins or patient actors, which both require extensive resources and manpower to prepare and utilize. With this manuscript, we describe a capability to enable medical care organic to the exercise, without the need for manikins or patient actors. To achieve this, medical equipment has been instrumented to create surrogate equipment, which collects data during treatment to provide feedback and update patient state. The surrogate equipment is paired with a computer vision system, which uses man-worn cameras to monitor participants and provide measures of task performance. During a training engagement, when a participant is injured by a simulated munition, the trainee uses surrogate equipment to treat the casualty, and is assessed using data from the surrogate equipment as well as the camera system. A user evaluation of the system was conducted during the Synthetic Training Environment Soldier Touch Point 6 for Live Training Systems, at the National Training Center. A total of 19 participants (16 infantry; 3 combat medics) tested the system, providing feedback on the usability, training utility, and current performance of the system. Results were positive for all individual system components and the overall system. Based on initial testing, the use of surrogate equipment combined with a computer-vision enabled camera system represents a feasible and highly useful capability to enable medical care in large-scale military training.

Keywords
COMBAT TRAUMA, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, MEDICAL MODELING AND SIMULATION

Additional Keywords
Live training