RESQ-XR: AI-Powered Extended Reality Training for Emergency Preparedness and First Aid

RESQ-XR is a European project concept aimed at developing and validating an AI-powered extended reality ecosystem for first aid, emergency response and health-related crisis preparedness.

Conventional training provides limited opportunities for repeated practice, personalised feedback and safe exposure to complex, high-pressure scenarios. RESQ-XR will combine virtual and mixed reality simulations with trustworthy artificial intelligence to create adaptive and realistic learning experiences for healthcare students, professionals, educators, first responders and other relevant groups.

The system will analyse learners’ decisions, actions, response times and recurring errors to adapt scenario difficulty, guidance and feedback. A human-supervised AI component will provide personalised formative feedback while maintaining transparency, safety and pedagogical accountability.

The proposed activities include:

• Co-designing first-aid and emergency scenarios with healthcare professionals, first responders, educators and end users

• Developing interoperable virtual and mixed reality simulation modules

• Creating AI-supported learner modelling and adaptive scenario orchestration

• Providing personalised feedback and performance analytics

• Developing multilingual and culturally adaptable training content

• Addressing accessibility, ethics, privacy, cybersecurity and trustworthy AI

• Conducting cross-country pilots in educational, healthcare and emergency-response settings

• Evaluating learning outcomes, skill retention, transfer to practice, usability, acceptance and cost-effectiveness

• Producing scalable implementation guidelines and open training resources

Our team can contribute expertise in educational technology, instructional design, immersive learning, virtual reality, AI-supported adaptive learning, human–AI interaction, learning analytics, competency-based assessment, psychometric evaluation and mixed-methods research. Our previous experience includes the design and evaluation of VR-based first-aid training.

We are seeking an experienced coordinator, hospitals, medical and nursing schools, emergency care organisations, first-responder institutions, simulation centres, municipalities, civil-protection bodies and SMEs specialising in VR/MR, artificial intelligence, wearable technologies or learning analytics. We are also interested in partners specialising in health economics, implementation research, accessibility, ethics, data protection and trustworthy AI.