What do military warfighters, astronauts, and first responders have in common?
What do military warfighters, astronauts, and first responders have in common?
Whether they are being rocketed up into space, running into smoke and inflamed buildings, or performing life-saving tactics in public spaces, these professions feature humans who can be under extreme mental and physical fatigue and stress.
The fatigue and stress are so intense that they are known to cause people a host of chronic health and acute performance problems.
That’s why U.S. Air Force researchers are asking health and safety leaders to develop wearable technology to detect and counter the fatigue and stress among their workforce.
“These wearable technologies will ultimately be utilized in the field not only by the warfighter personnel but also firefighters, emergency responders, NASA and civilian astronauts, expedition crews, medical personnel, etc. to assess, augment, and optimize cognitive and physical performance,” officials wrote in a request for information.
The Air Force considers this endeavor so essential that it intends to invest $23 million over the next five years. Partners are expected to match that investment, setting the minimum funding for this program at $46 million.
But there’s a list of requirements that sensor-related tech developers must meet before proving that they’ll prevent risk and injury.
Requested Features and Capabilities of Wearables
Flexible: Wearables need to fit the agile, active, and unique physical positions these professionals are in to meet their mission duties.
Low Power: These professionals are often in remote areas and/or working long hours, so it’s not realistic for the wearables to frequently need recharged. The wearables must have a long life and require low power.
Affordable: In 2020, an estimated 4.6 million people served as career and volunteer firefighters, police, emergency medical technicians, and paramedics in the United States alone. The wearables must be affordable if they are to also be used by astronauts, warfighters, and other professionals in need of real-time assessment.
Scalable: The different wearables must be manufacturable and deployable at scale to meet the growing number of users across these professions.
Specialized: The most commonly adopted wearables today monitor health and safety data such as heart rate and GPS location, but there are many other metrics ranging from biofluid biomarkers to non-invasive biometrics that can be analyzed to better help “paint a picture” of a person’s holistic health and risk of injury.
Personalized Insights: Gathering data from multiple sensors and wearables doesn’t provide much insight until it’s collated and correlated. That’s why organizations need a system to automatically correlate the data across these wearables, including commercial sensors like smartwatches and smart rings.
Technology Adoption
Creation and adoption of new technology can take decades, but the military and other public safety organizations are pouring capital into the research, development, and commercialization of the next generation wearables and IoT. This, along with the growing number of organizations adopting these technologies into their health and safety programs, is a testament to the potential of these solutions to prevent risk and injury.
Related Reading: 3 Different Use Cases for Predictive Personal Health and Safety Monitoring
Next Steps
There are several companies building wearables but, as mentioned, the real value comes when the data from these wearables can be automatically correlated to provide contextual, proactive insights into potential risk and injury. VigiLife’s SafeGuardTM is an intelligent, AI-powered, sensor agnostic system that provides intuitive visualizations and insights on web and mobile to monitor the safety of your team in real-time.
Interested in learning more? Visit our website where you can read more about the technology, book a demo, or discover if our Early Adopter Program is right for your team.
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