A European wide, multidisciplinary consortium, coordinated by Austrian consulting company USECON, receives 5 million Horizon 2020 EU grant for its SHOTPROS project. With the help of Virtual Reality (VR) trainings SHOTPROS will train first responders’ decision making and acting capabilities under stress and in high risk situations to fight crime, terrorism, CBRNe threats and radicalism.

New project supports European police officers in their challenges

The European street patrol police officers´ field of action constantly changes and new challenges are emerging all the time. Being the first responder in novel and ambiguous high-risk situations exposes police officers to high levels of stress and performance pressure. Highly trained staff is required to properly evaluate the situation and to decide and act correctly under stress. Therefore, a decision making and acting based training framework is the go forward solution to support first responders´ action control in threatening situations. SHOTPROS contributes to the improvement of the competences and capabilities of European Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to prevent and mitigate the impact of criminal acts, whilst protecting fundamental European rights of its citizens.

USECON as project-coordinator

USECON is the of project coordinator of SHOTPROS under the leadership of Markus Murtinger, who is responsible for the  work package project management. Markus benefits from his years of experience in a leading position and from the numerous (inter-) national projects he was involved in. Gerhard Helletzgruber, Head of Finance, is responsible for financial part of the project management work package and was also involved with many (inter-) national projects. The work package “Dissemination, Exploitation & Communication” is led by Valerie Schlagenhaufen, who benefits from her knowledge of the economy and the media landscape. Due to its expertise in user research, USECON will also play a key role in the end-user studies of SHOTPROS.

Better Decision Making and Acting Performance enhanced by VR-Training

The project aims to create a validated Human Factors Model for Decision Making and Acting under Stress and in High Risk Situations (DMA-SR). Such a model is vital to understand how decisions in the presence of diverse stress cues are made.

For this purpose, SHOTPROS will develop a VR research solution to experimentally assess the degree to which various (human) factors influence DMA behaviour. Subsequently the project will develop a human factor-rooted training curriculum and a corresponding VR training solution to provide a comprehensive framework for practical training for decision-making and acting under stress and in high-risk situations in order to improve DMA-SR performance. Stress influencing human factors can be manipulated in this virtual environment to individualize training and make it more valuable. VR Training that adequately prepares police officers for real-life incidents improves the success of police operations and contributes to the civil security.

“Existing trainings mainly focus on skill training. Processes of decision making and acting and the impact of stress on these processes are neglected. We aim to set up a training framework, enhanced with Virtual Reality, to change the training methods in LEAs to improve decision making processes and minimize use of force, collateral damages and escalations.”

– Markus Murtinger (Coordinator of SHOTPROS), highlighting the relevance of the project

A team of 13 European partners from high-ranked research institutions, business companies and international Law Enforcement Agencies will cooperate for 3 years on SHOTPROS. The project started with a successful kick off meeting taking place in May in Vienna at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology.

International Law Enforcement Agency Network

During the project a pan-European network among international LEAs will be established in order to transfer knowledge gained in the project and to spread the results within the European Security Network. A tight integration of end users is a vital part of the SHOTPROS project and creates competitive advantages in fighting terrorism and radicalization.