# Interactive Training in Emergency Operations for the Response Community

> **NIH NIH R44** · GRYPHON SCIENTIFIC, LLC · 2020 · $153,169

## Abstract

In this competitive revision Phase II SBIR, Gryphon Scientific proposes to expand the scope of the
ongoing project to support the urgent need to develop and deploy training for two populations of
citizen responders at risk of coronavirus exposure. The ongoing Phase II SBIR project focuses on
training responders, including Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT) and the Medical
Reserve Corps (MRC). We will expand the training for this group and add training for essential
workers, a category of citizen responder that includes a large variety of occupations from transit
employees to grocery workers. The training content in our existing grant includes such topics as
disaster operations, deployment safety, mass casualty triage, and light search and rescue. Here,
Gryphon proposes to incorporate a self-paced biopreparedness foundations minicourse and an
adaptive role-playing minigame focused on pathogen safety for citizen responders. Building on the
role-playing system, Gryphon also proposes to build interactive scenarios to train essential workers
on core pathogen safety concepts. The full package will be deployed freely through app marketplaces
for self-service remote training. This training technology would reinforce the ongoing efforts by
training organizations across the US to improve safety for at-risk workers performing essential job
functions. Recognizing that financial constraints pose a barrier to the sale of novel commercial
training products, the app will be deployed at no out-of-pocket cost to organizations or trainees using
an advertising-supported business model commonly encountered in the mobile video-game market.
 Even before the pandemic, educators and researchers called for enhanced pathogen literacy in
the general public as an essential component of pandemic preparedness. This study proposes to
collect valuable data on learners’ understanding of pathogen safety fundamentals and the potential
efficacy of remote educational approaches to enhance microbiological literacy. Usability and
knowledge retention in citizen responders will be integrated into the base Phase II study. An
additional study with essential workers will test their usability and knowledge gains from using remote
self-service learning products. Testers will be randomly assigned into three groups of 20 people who
(1) use the app regularly for 3 months, (2) use the app once, at the start of the three-month period,
and (3) a control group who do not receive the app. All testers will complete three short assessments:
pre-training baseline, immediately post-training (or one week after the pre-assessment for the control
group), and approximately three months following the date of first training. The initial products
developed in this study may directly improve microbiological literacy among at-risk populations, and
these early studies may help to inform future training interventions.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10149879
- **Project number:** 3R44ES025448-03S1
- **Recipient organization:** GRYPHON SCIENTIFIC, LLC
- **Principal Investigator:** Gautham Venugopalan
- **Activity code:** R44 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $153,169
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2020-07-01 → 2021-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10149879

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10149879, Interactive Training in Emergency Operations for the Response Community (3R44ES025448-03S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10149879. Licensed CC0.

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