Physiological Measures of Situation Awareness in Emergency Care

Situation awareness (SA) is crucial for jobs across the healthcare industry, especially in fast-paced emergency environments. Currently, measures of SA are subjective or require the person to stop and answer questions about the situation. A method to continuously and quantitatively detect levels of SA could potentially serve to assess training effectiveness or to intervene during care when SA is inadequate before mistakes occur. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether electroencephalography (EEG) and/or functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) measured at a single location provide additional explanatory value for SA beyond behavioral and experiential characteristics in a simulated emergency care task. Participants with varying levels of medical training completed the task; the Situation Awareness Global Awareness Technique (SAGAT) was used as ground truth for SA assessment. SAGAT scores correlated with both task performance and experience level; however, neither EEG nor fNIRS were correlated with SA.