The Internet of Things for Body Area Networks

The proliferation of smartphones and BLE technologies over the past 5+ years has created the perfect environment for the explosion of the IoT. These same technologies can be exploited in a tactical military environment to collect soldier biometric data for analysis and assessment – and potentially other types of sensor data (terrain, CBRNE detection, electronic warfare, etc.) for enhanced situational awareness (SA) and command and control (C2) decision making. An enabling technology for the military that is currently being fielded is tactical networking at the platoon level in the form of Rifleman Radios running the Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW) and the Nett Warrior End User Device (EUD). These networks are connected via gateways back to the Company and above for C2 including SA and battlefield assessments. This SBIR creates a bandwidth efficient, open architecture BAN solution (named SAMSON) for sensors to be easily added into the tactical network utilizing the EUD and Nett Warrior, thus enhancing troop readiness assessment.