Situational Awareness for Effective Movement and Engagement (SAFE ME)
Situational awareness is the ability to notice what’s happening around you, understand it, and respond in a way that keeps you safe while completing a task. It’s a concept that’s well-known in high-risk fields like firefighting or the military but hasn’t been widely seen as a core health competency. Our framework emphasizes multisensory detection, clear communication, risk assessment, and the safe execution of movement during everyday activities, which change over time and across different contexts. This research program is the first to prioritize assessing and promoting situational awareness as a key strategy for preventing MSK injuries throughout the lifespan.
Co-PIs: Joy MacDermid and Susan Scollie
Stream 2: $25,000
Activities like play, sports, work, leisure, and even daily tasks come with inherent risks. While researchers at BJI have often focused on mobility, we want to understand human mobility through a safety lens.
Situational awareness is the ability to sense, think, and act to achieve a task or goal in a safe way. Any breakdown in the process can lead to injury. Though commonly applied in high-risk occupations, like firefighting, we seek to apply this concept to everyday life. Understanding situational awareness and creating new solutions to optimize situational awareness in the real world is a grand challenge since no single assessment, researcher, patient experience, or approach will give us the answers we need.
We will look at situational awareness in a new way by integrating various viewpoints and assessments. We will assess existing equipment and expertise at Western and identify community partners that could tackle this problem, determine who is interested in working together to tackle this challenge, integrate patients concerns and priorities, decide what outcomes we should track, and what specific projects we should do. Our initial focus will be on assessment since it underpins future work. We are a new research team with a unique focus.
Our goal is to develop an understanding of how to measure and train situational awareness to achieve safe mobility while engaging in activities important to health and quality of life.
