Situational Awareness for Effective Movement and Engagement (SAFE ME)

Summary: Movement, activity, and task completion are critical to work, health, and life satisfaction. Yet mobility-related injuries (MrI) are common with musculoskeletal injuries alone costing Canada $15 billion annually. After a first injury we know that people are at elevated risk of future injury, and risk reduction (secondary prevention) is imperative. Situational awareness is the ability to sense, think, and act to achieve a task or goal in a safe way. For public safety and military contexts it is a recognized core competency. For health care it is “invisible” with only 215 of 37 million records in PubMed mentioning “situational awareness.” These 215 focused on crisis management in public safety. We propose Situational Awareness for Effective Mobility and Engagement (SAFE ME) as a core competency in secondary prevention of MrI. SAFE ME requires multisensory detection, risk cognition, and execution of safe task-oriented movement responses, but transcends the traditional disciplinary siloed approaches that fail to detect the cumulative risk or critical intervention targets. We will integrate clinical, public safety, engineering, and co-design methods to reduce re-injury. This toolbox will be tested in different contexts (e.g., workplace/home), mechanisms (e.g., falls, machinery), or injury types (e.g., fractures).