TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Biomedical, Battlespace, Human Systems

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordance with section 3.5.b.(7) of the solicitation.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this work is to develop a system to non-invasively monitor diver’s health. This system would monitor not only the diver’s vital signs but would also monitor the diver’s cognitive status.

DESCRIPTION: Divers are subjected to extreme environmental conditions which may lead to human errors and ultimately, death. The diving environment imposes great demands on the human body and the systems involved in maintaining homeostasis are routinely challenged when diving. Military divers, including special forces and SEALs, function in clandestine operations, use pure oxygen, perform long swims in the ocean environment and are subjected to battle stress. In addition, these functions are performed at remote, isolated areas without access to a diving medical officer or recompression chamber. The situation is complicated by differences in individual susceptibility. That is, divers may get decompression sickness using a dive profile that they have successfully used in the past; or divers using the same profile may show signs of oxygen toxicity on one day but not the next. Besides the extreme environmental conditions to which divers are exposed, they also must cope with the increasingly complex diving equipment and increasingly complicated mission plans.

Biomedical issues that must be addressed when diving include barotraumas, hypo/hyperthermia, nitrogen narcosis, oxygen toxicity, decompression sickness, arterial gas embolism, high pressure nervous syndrome, fatigue, stress, mental fatigue, sleep deprivation, underwater blasts, and diving in polluted water. In the case of surface supplied divers, the divers have communication with Master Diver on the surface. The Master Diver must make mission critical decisions based on his communication, or lack thereof, with the diver. The safety and efficiency diving operations would be greatly improved if diver’s vital signs could be monitored by personnel on the surface. Prospective monitoring might include: 1) bubble monitoring to correlate with decompression sickness, 2) core and skin body temperature, 3) partial pressure of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and oxygen, 4) respiratory rate, 5) EEG, 6) ECG, 7) heart rate, 8) ambient water temperature, 9) depth, 10) time of dive 11) blood pressure, 12) noise dosimetry and 13) a battery of cognitive measures to determine fatigue and/or stress.

The U.S. Navy is interested in developing a non-invasive instrument to monitor diver’s physiological and cognitive health. This instrument would allow the monitoring or detection of physiological and cognitive states and would vastly improve the safety and efficiency of diving operations. Such an instrument might virtually decrease the number of divers who are injured by DCS, oxygen toxicity, and hypothermia. It would be a new tool in the prevention, detection and treatment of injuries caused by alterno-baric environments

PHASE I: Provide initial development effort that demonstrates capabilities of proposed diver health monitoring system. Development should include divers that are surface supplied in adddition to free swimming divers. This phase would provide key information about the uses and limitations of the system.

PHASE II: Use instrument/algorithms to correlate data with known clinical pathologies such as DCS, hypothermia, oxygen toxicity, mental fatigue.

PHASE III: This phase would concentrate on hardening the equipment/standard operating procedures so that the device could be used by surface supplied divers. Since surface supplied divers have a connection to the surface, telemetry of data would not be necessary. However, cables and couplings would need to operate in a sometimes challenging environment. The system should also be adaptable to free swimming divers telemetry of data would be useful.

PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: This technology would be of interest to not only the military diving community and probably NASA, but also commercial (underwater construction and oil companies) and the large recreational diving communities. There are millions of divers world-wide who would use this system. In addition, NASA would be interested in this system to monitor astronauts on EVA (extra-vehicular activity).

REFERENCES:
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2. Tan W, Loeb GE. Feasibility of prosthetic posture sensing via injectable electronic modules. IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2007 Jun;15(2):295-309.

3. Dhruva VN, Abdelhadi SI, Anis A, Gluckman W, Hom D, Dougan W, Kaluski E, Haider B, Klapholz M. ST-Segment Analysis Using Wireless Technology in Acute Myocardial Infarction (STAT-MI) trial. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2007 Aug 7;50(6):509-13. Epub 2007 Jul 23.

4. Stepnowsky CJ, Palau JJ, Marler MR, Gifford AL. Pilot randomized trial of the effect of wireless telemonitoring on compliance and treatment efficacy in obstructive sleep apnea. J Med Internet Res. 2007 May 17;9(2):e14.

KEYWORDS: DCS; bubble detection; cognition; hypothermia; Oxygen toxicity seizure; HPNS

TPOC: Elizabeth Montcalm-Smith
Phone: (703)696-2580
Fax:
Email: montcae@onr.navy.mil