Patient Transportable Tactical Combat Casualty Care Documentation Capability

CR&D will develop a hand-held, temporary tattoo printer designed to be used to print tattoos on the skin of warfighters at the POI or healthcare facility with the intent of replacing TC3 cards and aftercare instructions respectively. The intent is to eliminate the loss of information resulting from various touch-points along the continuum of care or in the days following outpatient release. The primary technical objective of this project is to address the limitations of the existing off-the-shelf printing technology by evaluating new ink and printhead approaches that will yield a field-capable, hand-held tattoo printer which will be cost-effective, light-weight, small, and able to print over 200 tattoos from a single cartridge across a wide spectrum of skin tones. Upon addressing this primary objective, the research will turn to the secondary objectives including construction of prototype printers that can be used for field trials with medics at various field test environments such as USA Army TRADOC Battle Lab, Marine Corps Limited Objective Experiment (LOE) and Army Network Integration Exercise (NIE). This will also include the creation of the software necessary to generate medical QR codes via the Nett Warrior EUD and decoding algorithms to demonstrate the repopulation of TC3 data.