Deriving Degraded Warfighter Performance from Skin Memories

Our effort provides a wearable, biosensor that will monitor the physical conditions of warfighters, unobtrusively and non-invasively, using the physiological state memories contained within the skin.  The biosensor will result in a digital summation of the human physiological response captured in the epidermis, primarily in sweat glands and the stratum corneum.  The onset of fatigue and dehydration related to degraded warfighter performance typically results in changes in the biochemical makeup of the skin. These known physiological changes will be simulated using surrogate skin materials and synthetic sweat components to sense the electrochemical changes during steady-state measurements. This reagentless, steady-state sensor technology would overcome the physiological lag response of active and continuous perspiration that is necessary in traditional sweat sensing approaches.  Additionally, since the sensor output is a digitized electrical signal, future applications may include enabling direct human-machine interfacing capabilities for multi-sensor integration and autonomic sensing capabilities.