Supporting teams during crises

How can we support teams with feedback on their functioning during highly stressful situations? One of the ways to enable the provision of relevant and timely feedback, is to assess teamwork through signals that reflect team coordination (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance, movement). Teamwork involves two or more team members working interdependently to achieve a common goal. To effectively function as a team, team members have to coordinate their behaviour by aligning their contributions towards goal achievement (i.e., team coordination). Thus, one way to examine teamwork, is by measuring signals that can be used to estimate team coordination. These signals capture the dynamics within team coordination that represent the dynamically changing coordination of team member behaviour to address changes in their working environment, such as a change from performing a standard surgery on a patient to resuscitation. An example of a way in which a signal can capture team coordination dynamics, is through the coupling and decoupling of heart rates across interacting team members. Moreover, signals reflecting coordination dynamics can be captured in real time with wearable technology. This enables the real time analysis of team coordination, which can form a base for the provision of feedback on team functioning. While real-time feedback has the potential to provide critical support for teams that operate in high-stakes environments, knowledge is limited regarding 1) how signals reflecting coordination and subsequent coordination dynamics correspond to effective team functioning, and 2) how feedback based on team coordination dynamics should be provided (e.g., feedback delivery modalities, content, timing) to enhance team functioning during stressful events. For this reason, the current project has a two-pronged research goal, 1) to identify viable measures for examining and monitoring effective team functioning with wearable technology and 2) to develop and evaluate ways of generating and providing relevant and timely feedback for the augmentation of team functioning during crisis events. Consequently, with our research, we aim to advance our knowledge toward ultimately enabling the support of teams responding to, and mitigating negative consequences of, crisis situations.