TV<\/span>\u00a0show Big Brother without the drama. The Project seeks to turn a wide variety of human biophysical signals into machine-readable data by outfitting humans and their environment with interactive\u00a0sensors.<\/p>\nThe Army is not alone. The Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, and their special operations forces are also funding research to collect biophysical data from soldiers, sailors, Marines, and pilots. The goal is to improve troops\u2019 performance by understanding what\u2019s happening inside their bodies, down to how their experiences affect them on a genetic level. It\u2019s not exactly genetically engineering soldiers into superhero Captain Americas; the\u00a0U.S.<\/span>\u00a0military insists they have no intention of using biometric data science for anything like the genetic engineering of superior traits. But it\u2019s close. The military is after the next best\u00a0thing.<\/p>\nIf today\u2019s Pentagon leaders get their way, the next generation of fighter jets, body armor, computer systems, and weapons will understand more about the pilots, soldiers, and analysts using them than those operators understand about the machines they are using. The very experience of flying the plane, analyzing satellite images, even firing a gun could change depending on what the weapon, vehicle, or software detects about the person to whom the weapon is bound. To make this dream real, Pentagon-backed researchers are designing an entirely new generation of wearable health monitors that make Silicon Valley\u2019s best consumer fitness gear look quaint. They\u2019re discovering how to detect incredibly slight changes in focus, alertness, health, and stress \u2014 and to convey those signals to machines. Design the boots well enough and the super soldier will arrive to fill\u00a0them.<\/p>\n
Army Research Lab researchers already monitor individual subjects from six months to two years. Brooks wants to expand that to other military training environments, such as the\u00a0U.S.<\/span>\u00a0Military Academy at West Point, and then to more than a dozen universities. He hopes the data will reveal how people of varied size, weight, height, health, level of alertness, etc., differ in terms of the signals they send out \u2014 hence the name \u201chuman variability.\u201d That, in turn, will help researchers gather much more precise information on how different people interact with their environment. The ultimate goal is sensors that can tell the Pentagon how each human soldier performs, or could perform, to their best ability, from battlefield to\u00a0homefront.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s not just while they\u2019re at work, but also when they go on leave,\u201d says Brooks. \u201cThis is continuous, with the highest practical resolution that we can obtain for a long period of time. Hopefully, we would see information going into many programs\u201d to build future gear. \u201cA greater understanding of natural human variability would then feed pretty much any system that adapts to the\u00a0person.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an ambitious undertaking, considering the current limitations of body-worn sensors. Over the past two years, the military bought more than $2 million worth of FitBits and other biomedical tracking devices. But it turns out that off-the-shelf consumer devices aren\u2019t good enough for the military\u2019s biotracking ambitions. So researchers are creating a new class of wearables, based on new research into embedding electronic components into fabric. If the electrodes are too small, the signal is worthless; too big, and they feel like an artificial electric shell separating the wearer from the real world. The connection between the environment and the human must remain\u00a0seamless.<\/p>\n
One application for such sensors is helmets that record brain activity while their wearers do their jobs. An\u00a0ARL<\/span>\u00a0team is preparing for continous electroencephalography, or\u00a0EEG<\/span>, by using 3-D printing to create helmets that fit perfectly to each individual soldier\u2019s head. But the military is not eager to embed wires and metal into gear that\u2019s meant to protect a soldier during a massive blast. So the lab is constantly looking at new materials, solutions, and tradeoffs, inching toward sensors that collect information without getting in the way of soldiering. Lab technicians showed me one experimental electrode that they were making that was so small and soft to the touch it seemed to have no metal in it at all (they are in fact constructed of nanofibers that conduct electricity, encased in\u00a0silicon.)<\/p>\nFuente:<\/strong>\u00a0http:\/\/www.defenseone.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"De los avances en la ciencia biom\u00e9trica se infiere que las tropas futuras luchar\u00e1n con armas que puedan entenderlos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2263"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Karkh](\"http:\/\/cdn.defenseone.com\/media\/img\/upload\/2017\/07\/12\/12340104483_de175dad2c_k\/defense-large.jpg\")
Imagine a group of volunteers<\/strong>, their chests rigged with biophysical sensors, preparing for a mission in a military office building outfitted with cameras and microphones to capture everything they do. \u201cWe want to set up a living laboratory where we can actually pervasively sense people, continuously, for a long period of time. The goal is to do our best to quantify the person, the environment, and how the person is behaving in the environment,\u201d Justin Brooks, a scientist at the Army Research Lab, or\u00a0ARL<\/span>, told me last\u00a0year.<\/p>\n