What we have is a virtual environment
to train medical team leaders
to care for wounded persons
following a massive arrival of wounded people
that may originate in a terrorist attack
or from natural catastrophes.
The set-up addresses firefighters
or the military personnel
who have to handle the crises
and, consequently, coordinate
the "medics" and distribute
as, best as possible, the human resources
to save a maximum amount of lives.
The medical team leader is a doctor
plus a nurse
and two auxiliary "paramedics".
There are two wounded persons down
but the figure could rise to 20, to 50
with maybe with two teams on site
thus another doctor, another nurse,
and two other auxiliary "paramedics".
The medical leader
must be trained, i.e.,
not only possess the medical skills
but, more than this, the non-medical skills.
What is interesting here is
training needed for stress,
and the team stress too,
to ensure efficient communication,
to make the right decisions,
so to challenge is to have
this leader face
several teams
who will be more or less efficient
more or less prone
to the stressful conditions
in very different scenarios
that represent what may well
occur in reality.
In order to generate a set of "comm" errors
the ideal approach would be
to use voice recognition & command,
somthing that may prove difficult
and in the framework of this programme
we focus on modelling techniques,
with characters and scenarios,
for the time being we use menus.
In this project, there is quite a lot of research
in social sciences and humanities,
in didactic ergonomics
with collagues who also
work in neurosciences
part computer sciences and applications,
with research on
cognition sciences
and artifical intelligence (AI).
What we do is programme the behaviour
of autonomous virtual agents
who will be self-motivated,
and who can and will make mistakes,
and also work on scenarios.
Here again we use AI techniques
where we plan in advance
an uncertain environment
because we do not yet know
how the learner(s) will react
and, inasmuch as the characters are autonomous
there are uncertainties as to what
these characters may in fact do.
Thus we have to bring together
the learning situations
in regard to the uncertain factors.
This is a major research thrust
that wil last some 4 1/2 years,
so we are half-way there today,
it s a project with a consortium
of seven partners
with research labs,the Paris fire-fighters,
the military hospital Val-De-Gr창ce
and REVIATECH, which is a start-up
that develops the virtual environments for us.