MedCognition

About the Team

Team Members: John Quarles, Kevin King, Roland Paquette, Hector Caraballo, and Brian Dedmon
The PerSim team is composed of the founders of MedCognition, Inc. a recently formed (2016), pre-product startup company formed in San Antonio, Texas. Their mission is to make high fidelity simulation accessible throughout the chain off medical care. With their combined expertise and experience, and intention to commercialize this as a product, they feel they have a high potential of success.

Their team is made up of the following personnel.

• Dr. Kevin King is a board-certified emergency physician with extensive military and combat experience who brings his administrative, clinical and educational expertise to head this project. He envisioned the AR simulation device and has been integral to its development.
• Dr. John Quarles is an associate professor of computer science with extensive background and research in virtual and augmented reality. He is the primary software and hardware architect of the AR simulator.
• Roland Paquette is an former US Army Special Forces medic now Physician Assistant who owns and operates his own first responder training company. Thus, Roland has a deep understanding of EMT training needs and limitations.
• Dr. Hector Caraballo is a board-certified emergency physician with expertise in medical education and training.
• Brian Dedmon, MBA, is a chief financial officer who has extensive experience in startups and compliance, which helps to ensure their prototype is successful when transitioning it to a market product and getting it into the hands of actual customers.

The Solution 

The PerSim team provided a proposal based on the extension of their current functional prototype of PerSim to build upon its use for EMT training.  Their system is an AR projection of a human being onto a mannequin torso that can run through animation sequences that would be found during certain situations or health conditions. The solution provides the ability to design custom scenarios based on a library of building blocks that could be expanded to further develop the animation/scenario library of the AR projected human, in addition to the development of side projections. These include belligerent patients, panicky bystanders, and cars speeding by, which are all significant dangers, distractions, and pressures commonly found in real scenes.  There may be potential to use this solution beyond EMT training and could be expanded beyond the predefined scenarios developed by this team to custom scene creation.