Remote Assistance for Casualty Care (RACC)
Often during combat, a soldier may incur treatable injuries beyond the expertise of the locally available medic. The goal of RACC is to deploy the relevant knowledge and expertise instead of additional highly-trained medical officers.
The RACC program enables a virtualized remote telepresence for a medical officer located at a medical treatment facility to guide and assist the remote medic in performing the more advanced procedures. The medic employs a mobile device to capture live video and sends it over a bandwidth-limited military tactical radio network where a medical officer can pause, rewind, and find places in the video to add actionable information and directions as general annotations.
As the medical officer makes annotations, they are attached to physical spatial positions on the injured soldier, not specific frames in the video. By registering the annotations to a physical spatial location on the wounded soldier, we mitigate the low bandwidth and latency problems inherent in a live video feedback system.
Annotations can be reviewed numerous times by moving the camera’s field of view over the same spatial area on the individual. Once the annotation has been addressed, the medic can mark it complete and move to the next annotation.
RACC Features
- Relies on Neya developed EUD algorithms for tracking visual features on patients in the field, to be used for spatially registering medical annotations without the use of fiducial markers
- Provides medical officers with control station software allowing them to draw annotations on handheld video to aid combat medics
- RACC provides a modifiable library of intuitive and expressive annotations for medics to employ and view