Advanced Development for Defense Science and Technology

During combat situations, a soldier can become overloaded with visual and auditory stimuli. Of paramount importance is the capacity to filter out irrelevant (or distractor) stimuli, and attend to relevant stimuli. Effective modulation of activity in a soldier’s fronto-parietal brain regions has the potential to optimize attentional deployment and processing of relevant and irrelevant stimuli while increasing their overall attentional capacity and perceptual abilities. Current modulation techniques based on invasive and noninvasive neural stimulation technologies suffer from many limitations that make such neural modulation impractical or inefficient for warfighter use. This proposed project will explore the feasibility of using Electromechanical Stimulation (EMS), a potentially superior noninvasive brain stimulation technique, to modulate the brain activity for the enhanced processing of visual stimuli. Ultimately, an individualized helmet for each soldier could be developed with an integrated EMS stimulator to enhance a soldier’s cognitive performance.