Lethal Force Encounters Yet Another Opportunity For Engineering Education

Interdisciplinary research at Minnesota State University, Mankato and the cooperation of Tempe Police Department has made it possible to develop instrumentation and to establish baseline performance metrics for the evaluation of human performance in extreme encounters. A Motorola MC68HC11 microcontroller board was adapted by two Electrical Engineering graduate students who had no previous computer interfacing experience to control 27 Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) and to track the trigger position of a modified training pistol. Software to control and support the system came from integration of commercial packages and student authored code. The system created was used to test over 100 Tempe police department officers during the summer of 2003. The measurements obtained by this testing have made it possible to establish both how quickly the “average” officer can pull the trigger given a “go” signal and also how long it takes for the “average” officer to quit firing the weapon given a “stop” signal under a variety of cognitive load conditions. This research has created an environment in which graduate students have learned about hardware design and integration, software engineering and validation, and compressed design cycles. Students involved in this research have also learned that research schedules are many times driven by factors outside of their control.