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IndustryAbstract
Spatial disorientation (SD) remains a significant cause of accidents for military pilots. Despite technological advancements in flight displays and instrumentation, increasingly complex workloads can place pilots in situations where they find themselves relying primarily on sensory cues, leading them to question their aircraft displays and misjudge actual aircraft orientation (Lewkowicz et al., 2020). Continuous training has been identified as an effective approach to guide pilots to accurately respond to SD (Pennings et al., 2020). However, continuous training requires training methods that are not resource intensive, provide rich information, and most importantly, are engaging (Sitzman et al., 2018). Current SD training methods often address one of the requirements making continuous training difficult to achieve. For example, traditional classroom training can lack the necessary engagement (Lawson et al., 2017) while controlled live training in an aircraft is limited by instructor availability, aircraft availability, safety considerations, and cost. These issues lead to a need in the training environment to provide an economic, low footprint, and portable solution without compromising engagement to combat the current SD training limitations. The current work presents the design of a novel training tool integrating virtual reality, galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS), and physiological metrics to provide a realistic SD experience that commensurate with a convincing flight environment. The virtual reality environment presents a series of SD vignettes that have been integrated with GVS sensors that induces vestibular sensations by delivering small electrical currents to the skin. The physiological metrics provide input to ensure the system delivers a realistic SD experience rather than relying only on self-report. Discussion of training effectiveness will be presented in terms of physiological, cognitive and behavior measures identified through prior literature reviews. Guidance will be provided on how to leverage components of the approach to enrich existing spatial disorientation trainers currently available.