The future conflict will have three critical capability deficiencies from a combat healthcare perspective:
- Insufficient quantities of combat health support infrastructure close to the casualty,
- Insufficient number of frontline healthcare workers, and
- Insufficient number of clinician specialists.
SABRN ‘System-of-Systems’
SABRN’s ‘System-of-Systems’ approach aims to scale combat healthcare capability at three levels:
- Scaling Infrastructure at the frontline (using SABRN LifePods).
- Scaling the number of Frontline Healthworkers (using SABRN’s Artificial Environment Simulations Education Modules).
- Scaling the number of Clinician Specialists (using extensive wireless connectivity using a variety of technologies including satellite, cellular, radio, edge and quantum computing).
SABRN’s ‘System-of-Systems’ approach will be a solution from a Defence perspective.
Scaling Infrastructure
Frontline combat health support can be scaled significantly with SABRN’s Defence LifePods.
The SABRN Defence LifePods can be placed strategically in different configurations across multiple contested zones to get the maximal benefits of saving lives.
This will provide our operational health workers (non-medical first responders) with infrastructure as far forward as the Casualty Collection Point, with a capability to extend forward to the Point of Injury.
Staged extrication of casualties with Defence LifePods via multiple rendezvous points will allow multiple clinical teams to attend to the casualties within each E-LifePod and perform the approriate types of intervention to save lives.
Transportation of the Defence LifePods could be performed by unmanned vehicles (UGV, UAV or USV) in the future to reduce collateral injury or death to search and rescue teams.
Several Defence LifePod variants will be manufactured to have resilience to CBRN threats (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear).
Scaling Frontline Healthworkers
Immersion into artificial environment simulation training areas will significantly improve preparedness of forward medical teams in remote, austere, hostile and overwhelmed environments (including in desert, jungle, alpine, urban and sub-Arctic environments).
The future conflict will overwhelm the number of qualified frontline (and hospital) clinicians so alternative skills-based training will need to be provided to non-medical personnel to lead the field medical response.
Combined Virtual Reality (VR) & Augmented Reality (AR) training regimes will help familiarisation of clinician teams to training environments and prepare for anticipated clinical problems.
The use of deep-reinforcement learning opportunities with immersive technologies like VR and AR will lead to rapid adoption of critical life-saving skills by non-clinician personnel.
The use of more traditional mannequin-based training will be used to reinforce and consolidate the newly-learnt life-saving skills.
Scaling Clinician Specialists
The use of advanced telehealth technologies such as Electronic Medical Records and Augmented Reality (AR) based telementoring will help enable the frontline healthworker in the Defence LifePods.
In overwhelmed environments, routine telementoring technologies will provide clinical and medicolegal support for skills-enhanced non-clinician frontline health workers to treat combat casualties.
AR-enhanced telementoring technologies will further enable frontline clinicians to perform life-saving procedures that are outside of their scope.