IMPRINT Confined Spaces

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Project Summary/Abstract Workers are exposed to hazards in confined spaces at Superfund sites and waste treatment plants and during emergency or disaster response in ever increasingly complex scenarios due to climate change related challenges like infectious disease, heat, and flooding. There is a need for short, incident-specific awareness training that can be delivered using technology-enhanced training products to support the health and safety of workers exposed to known, emerging, and new hazards from climate change. Existing field training exercises (FTX) for confined spaces provide live operational readiness preparation to perform basic entry and rescue in a standard set of scenarios; however, they are limited in their ability to address the full range of health and safety threats facing workers. Therefore, emergency response training organizations need a cost-effective training solution that increases the stakes and authenticity of simulations to better equip trainees to remain safe and effective when they are in the field. We will extend Charles River’s existing hazardous material (HAZMAT) and hazardous waste operations and emergency response (HAZWOPER) training tool—developed with support from the National Institute Environmental Health Science Worker Trainer Program (NIEHS WTP) and our partnership with The New England Consortium—to design Immersive Modular Preparedness Tutor for Confined Spaces Training (IMPRINT Confined Spaces). IMPRINT Confined Spaces uses narrative case study adaptive training with a mixed reality experience that combines physical and virtual environments to increase the stakes, authenticity, and training scenarios available to training organizations. We will extend IMPRINT’s capabilities through the development of an intelligent tutoring system tailored to the needs of adult learners, providing a strong theoretical basis to our training system’s continued development.