Soldier Safety and Performance through Wearable Devices

Wearable technologies have the ability to change how we perceive, and make decisions about, our health and well-being. In the military, utilizing these emerging technologies in training or operations offers potential life-saving and performance enhancement benefits. Up until now, very limited physiological data collection has been performed due to the overall integration, form-factor, power limitations, and data feedback to the user from wearable monitoring devices. The explosion of the wearables sector in the commercial arena has pushed industry to solve a lot of these issues for the consumer market, allowing for new monitoring opportunities within the military as well. This manuscript discusses a couple of the use cases for wearable technologies within military environments, specifically heat stress injury prevention and performance monitoring during training. Additionally, some preliminary wearable device gold-standard testing is discussed. From the applications described, it can be seen how integration of these technologies has allowed for safer training environments, but also has improved training effectiveness and sustained performance enhancement.