Towards a Virtual Teammate Whose Support Can Help Alleviate Stress in the Prehospital Care Domain

This is a summary of the author's PhD research investigating the effects that a virtual teammate and their support type have on a user's stress. The focus of this research is in the pre-hospital care domain, with particular focus on personnel with a limited skill set who provide care. There is a growing emergence of volunteer schemes in the United Kingdom ("Community First Responders"), as well as the USA and Australia, where volunteers provide first person on scene care in rural locations before the arrival of professionally trained medical personnel. Along with the increase of these community based schemes and with the support of their governing bodies come technology and systems designed to support and aid the important work that they carry out. With such opportunities comes the ability to investigate methods and design systems that aim to alleviate or manage user (care provider) stress, which is inherent in the situations responders attend and which can have consequences for both carer and casualty. The paucity of literature and existing knowledge about the demands and stressors that these volunteers experience whilst attending to callouts highlighted the need for a nationwide survey to understand these demands. The results from this survey motivated the following studies investigating how similar stress to that experienced in the field can be induced and detected using unobtrusive means of measurement and how individuals' responses to the stressors can be affected by a user interface. 'Alone and isolated' was revealed as the biggest contributor to stress amongst Community First Responders, if it was present, in a callout. We introduce the concept of a virtual teammate and explore how its presence and the support it provides effects user stress. This work goes towards answering our wider research question of whether a virtual teammate can alleviate stress.