Warfighter Lab - Evaluating HUD in CBRN Environment

VALIDATING INTEGRATION & CONGNITIVE LOAD

Visual augmentation systems are an integral part of the future fight.  Information delivered at the right time, in the right place, in the right way, provides the warfighter with an advantage on the battlefield.  If any of those ‘rights’ turn into a ‘wrong’, information can easily become a cognitive burden and adversely affect the warfighter’s performance.  Quantifying the impacts of visual augmentation systems will not only support better product development decisions, it will also inform effective equipment purchasing by validating that these systems offer measurable operational enhancements, or at the very least, do not impede performance in any way.

The Warfighter Lab recently completed a customer contract to quantify the effects of the developed visual augmentation system (HUD) on operational performance in a CBRN environment.  The objective of the investigation was to determine the robustness of the HUD over a non-HUD solution in providing real-time situational awareness information to the warfighter.

CBRN missions come with a set of specific challenges, including visual limitations due to the use of FM-50 masks, biomechanical and perceptual demands, button handling and shooting, and cognitive load from multiple competing sources of information, among others.  The WL designed a test protocol that put operators through tasks where they received information via HUD, as compared to via chest-mounted End-User Device (EUD) interface, under the same controlled conditions.

A significant sample of operators ran-through two distinct circumstances: a shooting task and an instruction task designed to mimic what they might follow during a decontamination task.  Metrics such as shooting accuracy, time, and errors, combined with subjective user feedback, concluded that information provided to the operator via Galvion’s HUD system is a suitable solution under tight CBRN contexts, with no negative effects on performance, and is preferred over a chest mounted EUD for the same purpose.

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