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The American College of Surgeons Bleeding Control Course (B-Con) empowers bystanders with hemorrhage control skills to manage prehospital emergencies, but demonstrates poor skill retention. The point of care use of a free Stop the Bleed mobile phone application on the retention of hemorrhage control skills from the B-Con Course was explored.Convenience sample of college students previously trained in B-Con were randomized into mobile application (MA) or control groups. The use of a mobile application during a simulated emergency scenario with tourniquet and situational awareness skills was assessed. Wound packing skill retention without intervention was also assessed. Survey data allowed for comparison of participant perceptions of skills with actual performances.MA (n = 30) was superior to control (n = 32) in correct tourniquet application (62.5% versus 30.0%; P = 0.01) with longer placement times (163 sec versus 95 sec; P0.001) and in calling 911 (31.3% versus 3.3%, P = 0.004). Participants maintain inflated perceptions of their skills, but generally feel underprepared for a future bleeding emergency.Mobile apps improve tourniquet and situational awareness skills and may serve as potential aids to improve bystander hemorrhage control skills in real-time, but require further prospective investigation into its use.

Mobile and social media have progressively become vessels for manifesting death and dying in our everyday lives. This article investigates the visual nature of social mobile media as "affective witnessing" by analyzing mobile media use during the 12th June 2016 Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando Florida (USA). How mobile media serve as witnesses and companions in this tragedy is demonstrated through analyzing first-person accounts, police body cam footage, 911 transcripts and online social media posts. This analysis reveals how mobile communication complicates situational awareness during mass trauma while also playing an important role in processing loss.

Problem: Some evidence exists that drivers choose to engage in secondary tasks when the driving demand is low (e.g., when the car is stopped). While such a behavior might generally be considered as rather safe, it could be argued that the associated diversion of attention away from the road still leads to a reduction of situational awareness, which might increase collision risk once the car regains motion. This is especially relevant for texting, which is associated with considerable eyes-off-the-road-time. Nonetheless, it seems that previous research has barely addressed the actual engagement in secondary tasks while waiting at a red light (as compared to just addressing the tasks’ mere prevalence). Objective: The present study investigated secondary task engagement while stopped at a red light using European naturalistic driving data collected through the UDRIVE project. Attention was given to the whole engagement process, including simple prevalence and the tasks’ relation (in terms of start/end) to the red light period. Moreover, given that texting is one of the most problematic forms of distraction, it was characterized in more detail regarding glance behavior. Method: Videos of 804 red light episodes from 159 drivers were annotated. Glance behavior was also coded for a sub-set of 75 texting events and their matched baselines. Results, conclusions and practical applications: Drivers engaged in at least one secondary task across almost half of the annotated red light episodes. Drivers who texted while stopped spent most of the time looking at their cell phone. Consequently, drivers might not have been prepared for potentially unexpected events once the light turned green. Further, drivers concluded texting a considerable number of times well after the red light period, which has potential implications for traffic safety.

A driver text messaging in the vicinity of a rail level crossing represents the merging of a high-risk, high-workload driving environment with a highly distracting secondary task. In this simulator study, we examined how texting impacts driver behaviour on approach to actively controlled urban rail level crossings. Twenty-eight participants drove a series of simulated urban routes containing rail level crossings, while sending text messages and while driving without performing a secondary task. At half of the crossings, drivers were required to respond to the crossing warnings as a train approached. Results revealed that texting on approach to rail level crossings had a detrimental impact on a range of driver behaviour measures. Specifically, texting more than doubled the amount of time spent with eyes off the forward roadway, resulting in drivers spending more than half of their approach time to rail level crossings looking away from the road. This lack of visual attention to the roadway was associated with a range of decrements in driving that may be indicative of a loss of situation awareness, including increased brake reaction time to the crossing warnings and a reduction in lateral position control. The findings have safety implications, not only for urban level crossings, but also for passive level crossings where no warnings are present to re-orient the distracted driver’s attention toward an approaching train.

Cell-phone use impairs driving safety and performance. This impairment may stem from the remote partner’s lack of awareness about the driving situation. In this study, pairs of participants completed a driving simulator task while conversing naturally in the car and while talking on a hands-free cell phone. In a third condition, the driver drove while the remote conversation partner could see video of both the road ahead and the driver’s face. We tested the extent to which this additional visual information diminished the negative effects of cell-phone distraction and increased situational awareness. Collision rates for unexpected merging events were high when participants drove in a cell-phone condition but were reduced when they were in a videophone condition, reaching a level equal to that observed when they drove with an in-car passenger or drove alone. Drivers and their partners made shorter utterances and made longer, more frequent traffic references when they spoke in the videophone rather than the cell-phone condition. Providing a view of the driving scene allows remote partners to help drivers by modulating their conversation and referring to traffic more often.

We describe a novel location and timekeeping system for a large, multifacility practice group using an app installed on mobile devices belonging to the staff. The system can be used independently of physical time clocks and without extracting information from anesthesia information management systems. The app creates geofences, reporting automatically when the user enters or departs the vicinity of a facility. The app displays the location of staff at all facilities, providing situational awareness. The leaving order of staff was adjusted daily using app data for the previous workload. This was successful; overtime was more evenly distributed year on year. Acceptance of the system was excellent.