Technology to Drive Extreme Runtime in Wearable Devices

Wearable devices provide the Department of Defense (DoD) with innovative insights to enhance the readiness of Service Members by identifying health and safety risks. However, the DoD currently faces challenges in continuous remote monitoring to assess readiness in harsh military conditions due to the limited battery life of commercially available wearables. Bridging this gap will offer valuable feedback to individual Service Members, enhancing performance and resilience, improving overall wellness within units, and aiding in decisions related to training, readiness, and mission execution.   The goal of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) topic is to develop a software solution that can integrate with existing wearable technologies to enable uninterrupted remote monitoring in demanding military settings. The application should address operational scenarios that involve significant movement, such as maritime environments, where detecting activity levels or sleep patterns is particularly difficult. At a minimum, the devices should continuously monitor heart rate, heart rate variability, physical activity/motion, sleep timing, and sleep/wake status throughout the day for a period of at least 30 days without needing a recharge.   Additionally, the software must efficiently process sleep and fatigue data on the device by leveraging advanced commercial technologies to drastically reduce power consumption and data size. It should format data for easy interpretation and integration into various databases, facilitating swift transmission to local servers through wireless methods. Developing this technology will significantly enhance the deployment of wearable devices over extended periods in environments with limited connectivity and bandwidth, where assessing readiness is crucial, but recharging devices may not be viable.   The unique advantage to SlateSafety’s proposal is that we already have a commercialized armband wearable called the BAND V2 and software platform with over 2000 devices in the field today that communicates data to commanders to prevent injuries. Because of this, the SlateSafety’s wearable already accomplishes many of the stated requirements and only needs adaptations in order to satisfy the requirements as opposed to a completely new design. The main goal of this STTR technical effort is to prototype these adaptations with the BAND V2 to improve battery life and add sleep and fatigue analysis. Our BAND V2 is different from most commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) wearables. It was originally designed with funding from the Air Force for the physiological monitoring of students throughout the DoD Fire Training Academy at Goodfellow Air Force Base to prevent overexertion and heat stress injuries during training. Because of this, it was designed as a large-scale physiological monitoring system meant to make it very easy to record and analyze the physiological status of large groups.