Interactive Training in Emergency Operations for the Response Community

In this competitive revision Phase II SBIR, Gryphon Scientific proposes to expand the scope of theongoing project to support the urgent need to develop and deploy training for two populations ofcitizen responders at risk of coronavirus exposure. The ongoing Phase II SBIR project focuses ontraining responders, including Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT) and the MedicalReserve Corps (MRC). We will expand the training for this group and add training for essentialworkers, a category of citizen responder that includes a large variety of occupations from transitemployees to grocery workers. The training content in our existing grant includes such topics asdisaster operations, deployment safety, mass casualty triage, and light search and rescue. Here,Gryphon proposes to incorporate a self-paced biopreparedness foundations minicourse and anadaptive role-playing minigame focused on pathogen safety for citizen responders. Building on therole-playing system, Gryphon also proposes to build interactive scenarios to train essential workerson core pathogen safety concepts. The full package will be deployed freely through app marketplacesfor self-service remote training. This training technology would reinforce the ongoing efforts bytraining organizations across the US to improve safety for at-risk workers performing essential jobfunctions. Recognizing that financial constraints pose a barrier to the sale of novel commercialtraining products, the app will be deployed at no out-of-pocket cost to organizations or trainees usingan advertising-supported business model commonly encountered in the mobile video-game market. Even before the pandemic, educators and researchers called for enhanced pathogen literacy inthe general public as an essential component of pandemic preparedness. This study proposes tocollect valuable data on learners' understanding of pathogen safety fundamentals and the potentialefficacy of remote educational approaches to enhance microbiological literacy. Usability andknowledge retention in citizen responders will be integrated into the base Phase II study. Anadditional study with essential workers will test their usability and knowledge gains from using remoteself-service learning products. Testers will be randomly assigned into three groups of 20 people who(1) use the app regularly for 3 months, (2) use the app once, at the start of the three-month period,and (3) a control group who do not receive the app. All testers will complete three short assessments:pre-training baseline, immediately post-training (or one week after the pre-assessment for the controlgroup), and approximately three months following the date of first training. The initial productsdeveloped in this study may directly improve microbiological literacy among at-risk populations, andthese early studies may help to inform future training interventions.