Smart Fabric Triage for Combat Casualty Care

Combat casualty care would benefit from faster, semi-autonomous remote triage, enabling fewer medics to effectively respond to mass casualty events and ensuring medic safety by reducing medic exposure to risks present at the point of injury. For this to occur, sensors and communication networks with suitable SWAP-C properties must be developed to permit force-wide deployment. Smart fabric technologies provide all of these properties. Smart fabrics allow the integration of physiological sensors into threads that can be manufactured at scale using existing fiber optics manufacturing technologies, and can be woven into garments like normal threads. Furthermore, existing fabric properties (machine washability, flame retardation) are retained. Specifically, we propose to use pulse oximetry in such smart fabric systems to allow the measurement of heart rate, blood oxygenation, and respiration, allowing identification of afflictions including hemorrhagic shock, a leading cause of combat casualties. Additionally, we propose incorporating robust communication capabilities into the fabric to allow communication of casualty state to medics or autonomous platforms. This technology, already demonstrated in basic research and in a winning MD5 hackathon entry, also provides a platform that may be readily extended with additional sensing capabilities to provide the full range triage capabilities.