The Medical Practice Initiative is primarily focused on the research and, ultimately, the development of medical training methods, technologies, systems, and competency assessment tools for the sustainment of military medical readiness.

To promote and accelerate this development, new modalities for medical training, data collection, and performance assessment are being sought and additional research proposals into the field of augmented reality for medical training is being solicited.

The methods devised and data collected in the course of this research may, in due course, lead to the development and integration of improved medical training systems and competency assessment tools.

The primary, but not exclusive, purpose of this MPI-ARM Program Announcement (PA) is to solicit pre-proposals and then, by invitation only, request full proposal submissions for research that will offer contextually relevant, novel methods for the real-time augmentation or enhancement of the user?s perception of reality, specifically related to the areas of medical training and/or practice applications and scenarios in both controlled and austere environments.

The augmentation or enhancement should be related to one or more of the following sensory modalities: visual or display information, haptic and/or tactile feedback, and auditory feedback.

In the context of this PA, haptic feedback refers specifically to force feedback whereas tactile feedback refers to the sense of touch.

Olfactory augmentation is explicitly excluded.

Prototyped systems may be portable or stationary, networked or non-networked, software, hardware, or combinations of both.

In order to facilitate the broader goal of reducing development costs and democratize access to technology used in the creation of medical training and simulation systems, software and/or hardware designs and specifications developed under this funding should be freely accessible to the broader training and simulation development communities.

Similarly, it is intended that the research data and validation study be made available as a public resource to further facilitate advancements in this field.