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USA TODAY SPECIAL EDITION
WEAPONS & TECHNOLOGY
AIR FORCE RESEARCH LAB
Many of the new wearable sensors are designed to attach to troops’ clothing, but others can be placed on or under the skin to gather tissue-level information.
temperature and gait; predictive algorithms process the data, then give soldiers and squad leaders visual alerts — red, yellow, green — that allow them to mitigate heatrelated injuries before they happen. Army infectious diseases physician Col. Matthew Hepburn envisions a future in which wearables provide similar pre-emptive alerts for contagions. As program manager of the Biological Technologies Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he’s researching wearable technologies that can prevent pandemics through continuous physiological monitoring. One promising technology, for example, is an implantable hydrogel that can be embedded just beneath the skin, providing tissue-level information that’s read by an external wearable device. “The hydrogel, which is about the size of a sliver, doesn’t produce a foreign body response, meaning it doesn’t form scar tissue around it. So, you can imagine one of these things being in place for weeks to years,” Hepburn said. Yet another possibility is field-based neuroimaging. “We can get much better information about a person’s mental activity and cognitive state by directly measuring brainwaves instead of measuring their behavior or other physiological things that are secondary and tertiary,” said Army Research Laboratory neuroscientist W. Dave Hairston, whose team is developing a mobile electroencepha-
“It performs the same way as a regular camouflage-printed uniform, but it can identify the location of a medically relevant event. So, the soldier’s uniform in and of itself can be a sensor.” — CAROLE WINTERHALTER, Natick textile technologist logram that records brain activity absent electrodes and electrolytic gel. “We’re working on flexible, pliable materials that we can use in place of electrodes. … And because they are soft and squishy, they could be easily integrated into things like a patrol cap or at-arms helmet.” Researchers at the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center are researching wearables that would provide molecular-level monitoring of the stress hormone cortisol and similar indicators. Also in the pipeline are outward-looking sensors to alert troops of environmental threats. Edgewood researchers are developing wearable chemical samplers that clip onto soldiers’ uniforms and collect chemicals from the air around them. Samples are subsequently analyzed to reveal whether soldiers were exposed to
chemical warfare agents or other toxic substances. Natick researchers are pursuing the same goal by developing a chemical array sensor that research chemist Joshua Uzarski describes as an “electronic nose.” “Your nose doesn’t have a detector for every type of thing you smell; it has an array of detectors that create a patterned response. Your brain … analyzes that patterned response and tells you what you smell,” said Uzarski, who works with Winterhalter in Natick’s Soldier Protection and Survivability Directorate. “We want to try to do that with a wearable sensor.” The myriad devices under development across the military will one day be fused together into a single, integrated system, according to Raj Suri, director of the Ground Combat Systems Division at the Night Vision Laboratory, within the Army’s Communications Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center. Therein lies wearables’ real potential, according to Suri. His team is developing augmented reality glasses that will eventually aggregate disparate wearables data and present it to soldiers and commanders in the form of actionable advice. Soldiers may be advised to fall back, for instance, if an explosive substance is detected nearby or if they show physiological signs of stress, the effects of which could jeopardize their mission. “Our vision is a fully digitally connected soldier,” Suri said.