Life Sign Decision Support Algorithms for Warfighter Physiological Status Monitoring (WPSM)

This proposal focuses on the design and realization of a Rapid Development Environment (RDE) for synthesizing Physiological Diagnostic Systems. A high level of productivity will be reached through the development of libraries of sensors, and of elementaryand complex physiology models. The user will compose a diagnostic algorithm and system prototype by combining building blocks thorough an intelligent graphical user interface. Composing, testing and validating a diagnostic system will be matter of daysinstead of months.The intended RDE will allow the user to specify both algorithmic content and hardware structure of diagnostic systems. The sensor libraries provided for this goal will allow modeling any sensor behavior, and will also accurately encode their reliability.This feature allows the software to accomplish two goals. The first one will be computing the ability of the diagnostic algorithms to perform their intended task. The second one will be to accurately estimate the reliability of a prospective physicalprototype as a whole and of every single component. Finally, the RDE will feature simulation capabilities for producing data streams of physiological parameters. These data streams will be useful for forecasting the prototype behavior in a wide variety ofrealistic contexts. This set of computational tools will have both military and civilian applications. Health monitoring systems developed with such tools have a broad base of applications. Telemedicine and web-based monitoring of home health patients and elderly peoplejust represent two major fields. Other relevant fields are in all the situations where health or life is at stake, and quick intervention is required. As an example, mountaineers could clearly benefit from a monitoring system featuring global positioningsystem capabilities. The athletes represent another category that could be greatly interested. In fact, they need to monitor their training stress in order to achieve the maximum result. Other categories involve police officers, fire fighters andprofessional scuba divers, just to cite a few.