An integrated logistics support system for training crew medical officers on advanced cardiac life support

Cardiac arrhythmia are life-threatening events and one of the most common medical problems in middle-age humans. An extensive and detailed emergency plan to follow for these events in situations where medical assistance may not be readily available is an obvious advantage. One situation befitting this description would be any manned mission into space where it would be impractical to have specialized medical personnel on board at all times, and where prolonged periods of time without communications with an expert on these events may occur. The most practical approach to deal with this problem has been determined to be the training of one or more of the crew members on the mission as crew medical officers (CMO's). If this approach is taken, there are a number of problems that must be addressed. The objective of this dissertation is the development of tools required to solve these problems through an integrated logistics support system for training and controlling the performance of CMO's in the management of Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) situations. The basic approach is to develop a performance quality index for ACLS tasks and use this index to monitor and control the performance of crew members throughout their tenure as CMO's. The control tool of the system is based on an integrated learning and forgetting model used to establish CMO performance level. The model represents an aid for trainers in determining a training regime and maintaining the performance standards. A performance evaluator and trainer is also developed using Visual Basic to help in the establishment of trainee performance level during training or retraining. All of these tools were evaluated using either expert opinion questionnaires or experimental results. The evaluation results for the quality of performance index show the index validity as an estimator of expert description of ACLS performance quality based on linguistic variables for a set of likely scenarios. The integrated learning and forgetting curve model is validated through an experiment performed using a simple task. Finally, the evaluation and training tool was validated through expert evaluation with very strong favorable results. In conclusion, the results of this research provide the tools required for an integrated logistics support system for training ACLS personnel.