Pilot Digital Twin for Neck Injury Mitigation

Military pilots face many challenges from injury risk, cockpit accommodation, and flight gears fitting to physical training, physiological stress, and cognitive performance. To address these challenges, Human Digital Twin, a non-defense commercial solution is converted to Pilot Digital Twin (PDT) to provide integrated, holistic, and dynamic representation of physical and physiological attributes of an individual pilot, thus enabling the use of advanced digital technologies to overcome these challenges. The mitigation of pilot neck injury/pain is identified as the first specific problem for Phase II, as it is a critical mission need of the USAF. Phase II objectives are to create a prototype of PDT, built a software system for PDT construction and utilization, develop a detail neck model and integrate it with PDT, use the integrated model to predict acute neck injury and chronic neck injury/pain, and develop machine learning models to predict neck response and injury risk. Phase II tasks include PDT creation, software development, neck model creation and integration, trial use study, data driven model development, and technology transition and commercialization. Upon the completion of Phase II, a PDT based software tool for pilot neck injury mitigation will be ready for transition and commercialization in Phase III.