STAT Earpiece Wearable for Blood Pressure Monitoring in Aviation and En Route Medical Care

Critical decision making, whether in medical care or aviation, is often limited by a lack of timely physiological information. Blood pressure (BP) changes in particular can massively impact mission readiness and survivability both in the cockpit and on the battlefield. If BP is not monitored and managed properly pilots can experience gravity-induced loss of consciousness (G-LOC) when exposure to excessive gravitational forces exceeds the body’s stress tolerance. At worst, the symptoms can incapacitate pilots' mental state and can lead to life threatening in-flight physiological emergencies or even deadly crashes. In combat, injured service members are at high risk of hypovolemic shock in response to blood and fluid loss with 90% of potentially survivable battlefield fatalities resulting from hemorrhage. The earliest warning sign of hypovolemic shock is often a change in blood pressure, but BP is only taken in 62% of combat casualties, and nearly 25% of those utilize arterial palpation in place of BP cuff measurements. In hypovolemic states, however, palpable pulses disappear in all large arteries as BP falls– making this an unreliable estimate of systolic BP. Battlefield medics and aerospace medical specialists alike require a simple, reliable, and effective way to persistently monitor BP in prehospital and aviation environments.  STAT Health will develop the capability to estimate BP from its earpiece wearable based on the analysis of PPG waveform morphology. This will be a novel, unique, innovative, and highly accurate ML-enabled BP estimator making STAT’s earpiece wearable the first of its kind to accurately measure ambulatory blood pressure from the head. This estimator will be developed using PPG morphology features derived from data collected among 50 subjects going through arterial line, exercise bike and lower body negative pressure (LBNP) that simulate battlefield physiological status to induce high and low blood pressure across different environmental and physical changes. Furthermore, STAT will complete research and development towards the first ever ML-enabled hypovolemic shock indicator based on STAT’s current biometric platform, and leveraging the collected data, which encompasses variables such as changes in blood volume and flow, blood pressure, heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), and other metrics. ???????