Ukrainian and US developers are building AI tools for troops treating battlefield wounds alone

For years, troops relied on handwritten cards and bulky manuals for battlefield medical guidance. Now, Ukrainian and US developers are building and testing AI tools to help when there isn't a medic nearby and evacuation isn't an option.

Battlefields increasingly shaped by drones have pushed troops into small, dispersed teams that may be far from medical care when someone is wounded.

"As the tactical environment limits the ability to move, then we have to provide care wherever we are," said retired military trauma surgeon Travis Polk, who leads the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Military Medicine Research. His team has developed a tool to address what he called a "tactical mismatch," where wounded troops may be far from the medical care they desperately need.

Another tool, the Tactical Aid Assistant app known as ALICE, was developed by Ukrainian trauma surgeon Roman Kuziv, the commander of the eastern Medical Forces and Sustainment Group, and is now being tested by medics at facilities near the front.

Kuziv told Business Insider the app uses Google's Gemini platform to guide a user through a trauma response. A soldier can photograph an injury, answer follow-up questions, and immediately receive relevant tactical combat casualty care protocol.

"Many times under the stress and under the environment of the war, they make the mistakes about how to treat themselves or how to treat their friends," Kuziv said.

One potential use for an app like this is helping users reassess tourniquets, the tight bands used to stop severe bleeding. Amid the chaos of combat, it can be hard for troops to remember when a tourniquet was applied and track how long it has been on.

Deciding whether a tourniquet can safely be removed requires more than knowing when it was applied, though, said Stacy Shackelford, an emergency medicine and surgery professor and former director of the military's Joint Trauma System. Making that call requires judgment about the wound and patient condition that is difficult to teach in basic first-aid training, let alone through an app.

Still, additional knowledge where there might previously have been none has certain advantages, she said. "Even if you focused on just taking off tourniquets in Ukraine, that would make a huge impact on their system," Shackelford said.

Add BI in Google so our reporting is easier to find when you’re searching for what matters.

ALICE has separate modes for medics and non-medics, Kuziv said, and has voice prompts to help distressed users follow the appropriate protocol even under intense strain.

The US tool being developed at the University of Pittsburgh is tackling the same problem, but with a key difference. It is designed to work entirely offline.