A virtual reality lifeguarding environment for research and training

PROJECT SUMMARY According to the CDC, drowning is the leading cause of unintentional death among 1-to-4-year-olds and is second only to vehicle accidents among 5-to-14-year-olds. Moreover, non-fatal drownings which often lead to permanent brain damage and other long-term deficits occur even more frequently and across all age groups.

A recent NIH Notice of Special Interest (NOT-HD-21-048) was issued “to encourage and facilitate scientific discovery for drowning prevention.” This proposal is an answer to that call. The majority of drownings occur in swimming pools and despite a widespread belief that swimmers are safe when lifeguards are present,

drownings occur year after year in guarded swimming pools across the country. The majority of drownings at guarded facilities occur because lifeguards fail to detect and recognize emergencies for what they are (e.g., a body at the bottom of the pool) rather than because they lack sufficient lifesaving skills or are somehow

negligent. Several years ago, our group published a review of the basic-research literature on visual perception and cognition in which we identified multiple properties of human perception and attention that are relevant to the surveillance component of lifeguarding. That work led to the general hypothesis that

surveillance failures of lifeguards are often rooted in fundamental limitations of human information processing and that a better understanding of the specific ways in which those limitations impact performance could inform the development of targeted training and operational procedures aimed at reducing preventable

drownings. A barrier to testing these ideas, however, has been an inability to achieve an effective balance between external validity of in-the-field conditions—which is critical for a real-life task like lifeguarding—and experimental control—which is critical for testing hypotheses. On the one hand, conducting experimental work

in field settings (e.g., at swimming pools or water parks) is untenable. Drowning events cannot be experimentally manipulated for both ethical and practical reasons. On the other hand, model laboratory tasks have proven insufficiently similar to actual lifeguard surveillance to generalize to in-the-field surveillance. This

R21 project addresses this barrier. It is to develop a virtual reality aquatics environment that simulates many of the immersive aspects of the surveillance component of lifeguarding while also allowing for control and manipulation of relevant factors. The environment will be validated by linking it to well-established and robust

effects in the basic literature on visual attention, while systematically building in many of the complexities of the lifeguarding task. Success of this project will open a wide range of opportunities for research and training focused on reducing the number of preventable drownings that occur each year and, in addition, it will provide

a path for conducting research on other real-life surveillance tasks.