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THE ULTIMATE SHIRT: Army Invents Wearable Medic
This is not just a fancy-looking Army-issue t-shirt. The Warfighter Physiological Status Monitoring system is an advanced, electronic textile that can monitor a soldier's fluid intake, body temperature and heart rate -- making a battlefield medic's life much easier.
By Karen Fleming-Michael
Army News Service
Medics on the not-so-distant battlefield may get assistance with the triage of injured Soldiers from a new system called Warfighter Physiological Status Monitoring.
WPSM allows remote triage of injured Soldiers using leading-edge technology, like electronic textiles.
"The medic will remotely know who's been injured and who he should go to first versus what we do now (which) is have the medic run to and find an injured Soldier, not knowing if another individual is in worse shape just 20 yards to the left," said Col. Beau Freund of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Mass.
"There's only one medic per a large group of Soldiers, so (WPSM can) provide situational awareness so a medic knows who is hurt and perhaps the extent of their injuries, so he can make some informed decisions about where he should be to save lives," Freund said.
A group of experts in physiology, engineering, electronics and textiles is developing WPSM for the Future Force Warrior, an Army science and technology initiative. The team, Freund said, is on schedule to deliver a system in 2006 that at a minimum must be able to detect if a Soldier is alive or has received a ballistic impact.
On the preventive medicine side, the WPSM system also needs to be able to detect how much fluid the Solider is drinking and if the Soldier is in danger of a heat injury, Freund said.
Future Force Warrior, Freund said, "is looking at what is possible and what capabilities we might be able to add to our warfighters in the near future. Let's build some systems, test them and pick from the cream of the crop which ones we want to include now and which ones will require future development."
The WPSM system has three aims. The system, first, should reduce combat morbidity and mortality by providing a medic situational awareness about the health status of his warfighters.
It's "providing a toolkit for (the medic) to make assessments and decisions," said Freund. "Essentially it tells if a Soldier has likely survived an injury or not. That does two things: one, it helps prioritize for the medic who he should go to, and two, it keeps the medic out of harm's way from rendering aid to someone who hasn't survived."
Preventive medicine is the system's second component. By monitoring fluid intake, body temperature and heart rate, the WPSM system can provide an idea of who is likely to become a heat casualty.
"Rather than just 'Johnny's hurt and here's his heart rate,' the system can give a medic early on indications about somebody who may be in trouble," Freund said.
The third aim of the system is giving commanders a snapshot about the overall health of his Soldiers so he can make informed decisions.
"To cross the road there's a certain risk. What do we get out of crossing that road now versus waiting? Many of our tools simply provide information for (the commander) to do some risk assessment and make decisions," Freund said. "We're not just looking at the medical solutions to help a medic, but we're providing commanders and operational unit leaders with situational understanding that will help them do their jobs. It's much bigger than the medical piece."
Early Version
When the team embarked on creating the WPSM system, they weren't tasked to create it in a specific form, so the design could be flexible. They had two mandates on the system, though: it had to be acceptable to the warfighter and couldn't degrade mission performance.
"All warfighters need to be able do three things: shoot, move and communicate. It (WPSM) has to have zero downsides. It can't have a wire that gets hung up or puts him in a bad posture when he's trying to fire from a prone position and he can't see through his sights," said Freund, who has worked on the WPSM team for two and a half years.
Currently, the system's temperature, life sign and ballistic impact detection sensors are contained in a soft belt created by Foster-Miller that's sewn into an Army-issue t-shirt. The company, based in Waltham, Mass., has the job of integrating the sensors with the fabrics.
"This work has been going on in the Army for quite some time, we get this great synergy of all these sensor developments they've done and the algorithm knowledge they have so the best system gets put together," said Douglas Thomson, business development manager for Foster-Miller. "What we really wanted was to present something that could bring it all together and get it fielded."
Sensors have been a preoccupation for Foster-Miller's Joe Ting. An engineer, Ting worked closely with the WPSM developers to ensure that sensors measuring heart rate, breaths taken, skin temperature and ballistic impact from various manufacturers all were included in the system.
"If you could (have one sensor that could do it all) that would be the Holy Grail because you could cut down on power, weight and size," Ting said.
Sensors typically are about an inch square, Ting said, with the temperature sensor about the size of a dime. The largest is the respiration sensor, which goes around the chest and when it stretches, it implies whether and how someone is breathing.
"In the short term (from sensors) you want to be able to tell that something's wrong, somebody's hurt. In the future you really want to be able to tell exactly what is wrong and how bad it is and what can I do to help," Ting said.
To take a step toward the future vision, Ting and his crew are working with a company that makes wearable defibrillators to leverage that technology into being able to read digital EKGs on Soldiers wearing the WPSM system. "Realistically, that's a little bit farther out," he said.
The Ultimate Shirt
Putting these sensors on a belt that's sewn into a shirt helps fulfill the mandate of not interfering with a Soldier's performance.
"By and large, the medic sees the need while the average Soldier just wants to make sure it doesn't get in his way. You can't stick electrodes on a Soldier who is going to be running through dirt and swamps. (Sensors are) going to have to be gel-free, stick-free, and work without shaving people, or else it simply won't happen," Thomson said. "You have to understand the functional environment in which these sensors operate and design a technical system to gather the data and be durable in that environment."
Operational realities are also being factored in to see if they impede the belt from passing warfighter acceptance, as part of the mandate. Concerns about how the system works under body armor, how data is transmitted, and whether a belt will stay in place, are all being studied by the WPSM team of military and industry experts.
A promising solution is embedding the sensors in shirt like professional athletes wear that wicks sweat off their bodies. Having this new-age shirt would combine temperature control with super-fine conductive fibers that can transmit data. Simply put, it's "the brave new world of electronic textiles," said David Costello of Malden Mills in Lawrence, Mass., which has partnered with Foster-Miller and the Army for the WPSM program.
"We're working on the marriage of electronics into fabric structures, which had been talked about for some time but now is actually starting to happen," he said. "Malden Mills is knitting into the fabric a conductive fiber that's about as thin as a hair and that fiber, once it's knit into the fabric is as durable and robust as the rest of the fabric and a conduit through which you can flow either energy or information."
Malden Mills has worked on electronic textiles for eight years and fielded a garment "like a wearable electric blanket," Costello said. However, moving from that garment to physiological monitoring is "a huge leap because what you're trying to do is far more serious than heating somebody up. It's still lab-based technology and not commercial based but we're going through our learning process so we can scale it up."
According to Costello, wearability and durability are two of Malden Mills' main concerns in designing the shirt.
"When you think about what Soldiers are wearing these days, with body armor on top of this, as well as load carriage systems, backpacks and weapons and belts, it needs to be totally integrated with what a Soldier wears so there are no issues with it rubbing a funny way or crushing a sensor or doing something that's not right."
The fibers in the shirt must also be able to withstand the rigors of a knitting machine, a washing machine and a Soldier's lifestyle.
"You need it to be very flexible as well as stand up to everything that it is going to get exposed to once it's being worn around," Costello said.. "(It's got to be) abrasion resistant, stand up to sweat and blood and dirt and salt and cold and wet and getting crammed into a backpack and sitting there for two weeks before it's pulled out and used. It can't have funk growing on it."
Concept
The general idea is the Soldier will put the high-tech shirt on just like he always has, except this shirt has sensors that collect data. All the data will flow to a wireless electronic information carrier that can then transmit the data to the medic via an antenna that's woven into the garment. Foster-Miller is working on what transmits the data as well as what receives it.
"As the Soldier of the future comes about, you're going to have this networked Soldier with a communications capability and all this computing power on him so the medic will be able then to zoom in on the Soldier, pick up some bandwidth, look at full readings on the data, and make a human assessment," Thomson said. "We're not talking about going to where the computer does the medical assessment, but the computer alerting the medic."
Keeping up with all the technologies planned for the future Soldier is also a goal of the WPSM team.
"It's important to stay abreast of the way the system is developing so we can connect properly to whatever network they're going to have on their body, because we're not going to provide the secure communications network off the body. We stay up on what all the programs are doing and coordinate with them," Thomson said.
Freund said the Army isn't concerned with whether the initial system is a belt, a cummerbund or a t-shirt, just that the system delivered in 2006 does what it was charged to do.
"If (WPSM is) successful in a belt format as an initial product, and we meet those metrics, then that's what the product will look like," he said. "I would like to deliver an electro textile solution in a t-shirt, if we could get that solution to work. Our goal is that when a warfighter dons his warfighting uniform, our system comes along for the ride."
According to legend, ghosts of dead presidents and a British soldier haunt the White House. President Abraham Lincoln is the most famous of the White House spirits. And Lincoln's own wife, Mary, reportedly heard the ghost of Andrew Jackson 'swearing up a storm.' There is also a story that claims a British soldier died on the White House grounds in 1814, as the building was burned by the British in retaliation for sacking of York (Toronto). It is said that the British soldier wanders with a torch in his hand.
This is not just a fancy-looking Army-issue t-shirt. The Warfighter Physiological Status Monitoring system is an advanced, electronic textile that can monitor a soldier's fluid intake, body temperature and heart rate -- making a battlefield medic's life much easier.
By Karen Fleming-Michael
Army News Service
Medics on the not-so-distant battlefield may get assistance with the triage of injured Soldiers from a new system called Warfighter Physiological Status Monitoring.
WPSM allows remote triage of injured Soldiers using leading-edge technology, like electronic textiles.
"The medic will remotely know who's been injured and who he should go to first versus what we do now (which) is have the medic run to and find an injured Soldier, not knowing if another individual is in worse shape just 20 yards to the left," said Col. Beau Freund of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Mass.
"There's only one medic per a large group of Soldiers, so (WPSM can) provide situational awareness so a medic knows who is hurt and perhaps the extent of their injuries, so he can make some informed decisions about where he should be to save lives," Freund said.
A group of experts in physiology, engineering, electronics and textiles is developing WPSM for the Future Force Warrior, an Army science and technology initiative. The team, Freund said, is on schedule to deliver a system in 2006 that at a minimum must be able to detect if a Soldier is alive or has received a ballistic impact.
On the preventive medicine side, the WPSM system also needs to be able to detect how much fluid the Solider is drinking and if the Soldier is in danger of a heat injury, Freund said.
Future Force Warrior, Freund said, "is looking at what is possible and what capabilities we might be able to add to our warfighters in the near future. Let's build some systems, test them and pick from the cream of the crop which ones we want to include now and which ones will require future development."
The WPSM system has three aims. The system, first, should reduce combat morbidity and mortality by providing a medic situational awareness about the health status of his warfighters.
It's "providing a toolkit for (the medic) to make assessments and decisions," said Freund. "Essentially it tells if a Soldier has likely survived an injury or not. That does two things: one, it helps prioritize for the medic who he should go to, and two, it keeps the medic out of harm's way from rendering aid to someone who hasn't survived."
Preventive medicine is the system's second component. By monitoring fluid intake, body temperature and heart rate, the WPSM system can provide an idea of who is likely to become a heat casualty.
"Rather than just 'Johnny's hurt and here's his heart rate,' the system can give a medic early on indications about somebody who may be in trouble," Freund said.
The third aim of the system is giving commanders a snapshot about the overall health of his Soldiers so he can make informed decisions.
"To cross the road there's a certain risk. What do we get out of crossing that road now versus waiting? Many of our tools simply provide information for (the commander) to do some risk assessment and make decisions," Freund said. "We're not just looking at the medical solutions to help a medic, but we're providing commanders and operational unit leaders with situational understanding that will help them do their jobs. It's much bigger than the medical piece."
Early Version
When the team embarked on creating the WPSM system, they weren't tasked to create it in a specific form, so the design could be flexible. They had two mandates on the system, though: it had to be acceptable to the warfighter and couldn't degrade mission performance.
"All warfighters need to be able do three things: shoot, move and communicate. It (WPSM) has to have zero downsides. It can't have a wire that gets hung up or puts him in a bad posture when he's trying to fire from a prone position and he can't see through his sights," said Freund, who has worked on the WPSM team for two and a half years.
Currently, the system's temperature, life sign and ballistic impact detection sensors are contained in a soft belt created by Foster-Miller that's sewn into an Army-issue t-shirt. The company, based in Waltham, Mass., has the job of integrating the sensors with the fabrics.
"This work has been going on in the Army for quite some time, we get this great synergy of all these sensor developments they've done and the algorithm knowledge they have so the best system gets put together," said Douglas Thomson, business development manager for Foster-Miller. "What we really wanted was to present something that could bring it all together and get it fielded."
Sensors have been a preoccupation for Foster-Miller's Joe Ting. An engineer, Ting worked closely with the WPSM developers to ensure that sensors measuring heart rate, breaths taken, skin temperature and ballistic impact from various manufacturers all were included in the system.
"If you could (have one sensor that could do it all) that would be the Holy Grail because you could cut down on power, weight and size," Ting said.
Sensors typically are about an inch square, Ting said, with the temperature sensor about the size of a dime. The largest is the respiration sensor, which goes around the chest and when it stretches, it implies whether and how someone is breathing.
"In the short term (from sensors) you want to be able to tell that something's wrong, somebody's hurt. In the future you really want to be able to tell exactly what is wrong and how bad it is and what can I do to help," Ting said.
To take a step toward the future vision, Ting and his crew are working with a company that makes wearable defibrillators to leverage that technology into being able to read digital EKGs on Soldiers wearing the WPSM system. "Realistically, that's a little bit farther out," he said.
The Ultimate Shirt
Putting these sensors on a belt that's sewn into a shirt helps fulfill the mandate of not interfering with a Soldier's performance.
"By and large, the medic sees the need while the average Soldier just wants to make sure it doesn't get in his way. You can't stick electrodes on a Soldier who is going to be running through dirt and swamps. (Sensors are) going to have to be gel-free, stick-free, and work without shaving people, or else it simply won't happen," Thomson said. "You have to understand the functional environment in which these sensors operate and design a technical system to gather the data and be durable in that environment."
Operational realities are also being factored in to see if they impede the belt from passing warfighter acceptance, as part of the mandate. Concerns about how the system works under body armor, how data is transmitted, and whether a belt will stay in place, are all being studied by the WPSM team of military and industry experts.
A promising solution is embedding the sensors in shirt like professional athletes wear that wicks sweat off their bodies. Having this new-age shirt would combine temperature control with super-fine conductive fibers that can transmit data. Simply put, it's "the brave new world of electronic textiles," said David Costello of Malden Mills in Lawrence, Mass., which has partnered with Foster-Miller and the Army for the WPSM program.
"We're working on the marriage of electronics into fabric structures, which had been talked about for some time but now is actually starting to happen," he said. "Malden Mills is knitting into the fabric a conductive fiber that's about as thin as a hair and that fiber, once it's knit into the fabric is as durable and robust as the rest of the fabric and a conduit through which you can flow either energy or information."
Malden Mills has worked on electronic textiles for eight years and fielded a garment "like a wearable electric blanket," Costello said. However, moving from that garment to physiological monitoring is "a huge leap because what you're trying to do is far more serious than heating somebody up. It's still lab-based technology and not commercial based but we're going through our learning process so we can scale it up."
According to Costello, wearability and durability are two of Malden Mills' main concerns in designing the shirt.
"When you think about what Soldiers are wearing these days, with body armor on top of this, as well as load carriage systems, backpacks and weapons and belts, it needs to be totally integrated with what a Soldier wears so there are no issues with it rubbing a funny way or crushing a sensor or doing something that's not right."
The fibers in the shirt must also be able to withstand the rigors of a knitting machine, a washing machine and a Soldier's lifestyle.
"You need it to be very flexible as well as stand up to everything that it is going to get exposed to once it's being worn around," Costello said.. "(It's got to be) abrasion resistant, stand up to sweat and blood and dirt and salt and cold and wet and getting crammed into a backpack and sitting there for two weeks before it's pulled out and used. It can't have funk growing on it."
Concept
The general idea is the Soldier will put the high-tech shirt on just like he always has, except this shirt has sensors that collect data. All the data will flow to a wireless electronic information carrier that can then transmit the data to the medic via an antenna that's woven into the garment. Foster-Miller is working on what transmits the data as well as what receives it.
"As the Soldier of the future comes about, you're going to have this networked Soldier with a communications capability and all this computing power on him so the medic will be able then to zoom in on the Soldier, pick up some bandwidth, look at full readings on the data, and make a human assessment," Thomson said. "We're not talking about going to where the computer does the medical assessment, but the computer alerting the medic."
Keeping up with all the technologies planned for the future Soldier is also a goal of the WPSM team.
"It's important to stay abreast of the way the system is developing so we can connect properly to whatever network they're going to have on their body, because we're not going to provide the secure communications network off the body. We stay up on what all the programs are doing and coordinate with them," Thomson said.
Freund said the Army isn't concerned with whether the initial system is a belt, a cummerbund or a t-shirt, just that the system delivered in 2006 does what it was charged to do.
"If (WPSM is) successful in a belt format as an initial product, and we meet those metrics, then that's what the product will look like," he said. "I would like to deliver an electro textile solution in a t-shirt, if we could get that solution to work. Our goal is that when a warfighter dons his warfighting uniform, our system comes along for the ride."
According to legend, ghosts of dead presidents and a British soldier haunt the White House. President Abraham Lincoln is the most famous of the White House spirits. And Lincoln's own wife, Mary, reportedly heard the ghost of Andrew Jackson 'swearing up a storm.' There is also a story that claims a British soldier died on the White House grounds in 1814, as the building was burned by the British in retaliation for sacking of York (Toronto). It is said that the British soldier wanders with a torch in his hand.
