Abstract
Protective equipment is designed to help shield against enemy fire, however, such cumbersome gear increases user-burden resulting in performance degradations during combat operations. This paper outlines the development and application of an automated approach to quantify bodily exposure to enemy threat in order to assess the impact of human factors interventions (i.e., protective equipment, tactical training, etc.) on survivability during simulated combat engagements. An image processing algorithm application is presented here, utilizing military personnel (N = 20) who ran an integrated combat obstacle course in three equipment configurations with varying encumbrance levels. Compared with baseline, encumbered equipment configurations led to increased exposure duration and cumulative area exposed across time, resulting in an effective implementation of the methodology for quantifying exposure. Quantification of approach behavior and protective cover during combat will result in better understanding of physical tradeoffs of protective equipment.
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Brown, S.A.T., Hancock, C.L., Mitchell, K.B. (2021). Quantifying Survivability via Measurement of Bodily Exposure During Simulated Combat Engagements. In: Wright, J.L., Barber, D., Scataglini, S., Rajulu, S.L. (eds) Advances in Simulation and Digital Human Modeling. AHFE 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 264. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79763-8_3
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