Identifying Meaningful Indicators of Collective Allostatic Load from Low-Cost, Wearable Sensors

A team’s collective allostatic load (CAL) is an unobservable theoretical construct, defined as the accumulated ‘wear and tear’ due to a team’s and its members’ repeated exposure to stress and strain. Stottler Henke, collaborating with Johns Hopkins University, proposes to explore the impact of CAL on individual and team performance over time. Affinity will advance the state-of-the-art in three ways. First, we will collect a new dataset that provides insight into the nature of the CAL construct and the role team processes play in moderating its effects on team performance. Second, we will extract team-level social context factors from sensor-based data streams and assess their viability in specifying a reliable CAL model. Finally, we will incorporate those factors, together with the CAL model, into our existing human state assessment framework, enabling real-time state assessment of teams. Demonstration of the essential elements of our system concept during Phase I has established a strong technological foundation enabling Stottler Henke to set very aggressive objectives for Phase II. We will develop a complete, integrated prototype, demonstrate its end-to-end operation in preparation for validation in a relevant environment, and deliver it to DARPA for further testing and evaluation by the end of Phase II.