Medical training in
every service member's
pocket
Radiant Images led a Department of Defense program with Harvard Medical School's STRATUS Center and IBM: combat casualty care scenarios captured in 4D volumetric video, delivered as interactive training that runs entirely offline on a service member's own phone or tablet, anywhere on Earth.
What is at stake
In emergency medicine, time decides survival. In military and humanitarian settings the odds are stacked further: limited supplies, unreliable electricity, difficult evacuation, and the threat of hostile fire, with every medical decision competing against tactical and operational demands.
Modern field hospitals can match or beat civilian survival rates. Forward, austere positions cannot: advanced medical tools are scarce, the nearest specialist may be a continent away, and the first responder is often the service member standing closest to the casualty.
Skills decay in months. Advanced cardiac life support knowledge fades over 6 to 12 months for physicians. For non-physicians, decay begins just 3 months after training.
No refresher in theater. Recurrent training is what maintains clinical competency, and deployed service members have no access to it at the moment they need it most.
Missions and lives on the line. Early recognition of deterioration and rapid first response decide whether a casualty survives and whether the mission holds.
The challenge
The US military leans heavily on simulation-based training: high-fidelity human patient simulators in realistic environments, the established gold standard for medical readiness. It works. But the physical nature of simulation, and the expertise required to run it in real time, keep it locked inside fixed training centers.
A deployed unit cannot bring the simulator, the staff, or the schedule. What reaches the field instead is flat content, and flat content cannot rehearse the split-second decisions combat casualty care demands.
Simulation cannot deploy. Expensive equipment, physical facilities, and specialist staff make simulation-center education impossible to scale into theater.
Hands-on realism is missing. Effective learning relies on immersive, hands-on experience that traditional educational solutions do not provide.
Zero connectivity. Austere environments offer no communication links, so any solution must run entirely offline, on the devices service members already carry.
The Radiant approach
Radiant Images, as lead on the DoD program, built the mobile training platform with Harvard's STRATUS Center and IBM. Emergency physicians scripted the scenarios from the military's official playbook for treating battlefield injuries, the Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) guidelines, together with public reports of real casualties from previous US military operations. Professional actors then performed them on Radiant's volumetric and light-field stage, captured by more than 100 cameras from every possible viewpoint, with each combatant isolated as its own 4D asset. Nothing is AI-generated: every scenario is a true recording of real people, preserving the urgency and realism of the event.
The captured scenes become branching narratives. Learners make the actual clinical calls, initiate vascular access, apply a tourniquet, escalate care, and watch the combatant carry out the decision and live with its consequences. Time-based progression lets the casualty worsen if the learner hesitates. An AI learning analytics engine, built on IBM Watson, benchmarks every decision and how long it took against trainees of similar competency, then delivers an individualized assessment with specific remediation. The whole experience runs offline on a phone or tablet.
The system
The capture
The impact
Skill decay is met at the moment it matters: service members rehearse recognition of early deterioration and initial response on their own devices, during deployment, without waiting for a training rotation.
Decision-based and time-based metrics are captured from every run and compared to benchmarks from trainees of similar competency, so each learner sees exactly where they stand and what to remediate.
No simulation center, no instructor, no connectivity required. The realism of high-fidelity simulation reaches the austere settings where it was never able to go.
Phase 1 delivered a working combat casualty care demonstration scenario on iOS plus the AI analytics architecture, a blueprint for a library of context-specific scenarios across combat and humanitarian missions.
Beyond the battlefield
If a skill is best learned by doing, it can be captured in 4D and rehearsed anywhere.
This team already trains far beyond the battlefield. The same STRATUS partnership designs simulation curricula for more than 600 clinicians across 150+ US embassies and consulates worldwide, and the Radiant and Harvard collaboration with NASA is preparing astronauts to manage medical emergencies on the way to Mars.
The blueprint transfers to any high-stakes field: mass-casualty and disaster response, remote and rural healthcare, first responders, energy and industrial safety, and hospital teams rehearsing rare crises. Wherever people must perform under pressure without backup, 4D volumetric training and simulation closes the gap between reading about the moment and living through it.
Train anywhere your team must perform
From the battlefield to deep space to the operating room: if your team must perform under pressure without backup, Radiant Images can capture the training that keeps them ready.