SBIR-STTR Award

Military aircraft maintainers face heightened risks to their health and safety in the workplace due to long work hours, exposure to particulates, noxious gases, dangerous noise levels, and adverse weather conditions, to name just a few examples. Industrial hygienists help to mitigate these risks by identifying and anticipating potential hazards as well as recommending changes that minimize future risks. Hygienists’ workplace investigations traditionally involve the manual observation and logging of events and work activities associated with potentially hazardous exposure levels. However, this approach is time-consuming and limited by manpower; a single hygienist can only observe so much of the workplace at any given time. This also means that the hygienist’s feedback is necessarily general, since continuous, simultaneous monitoring of individual workers is not feasible when observing manually. The proposed SAfE-AWARE system automates the monitoring of occupational environments and can alert workers of hazardous conditions/tasks. SAfE-AWARE represents a force multiplier for industrial hygienists that will ultimately improve the safety and health of workers in the military aircraft maintenance industry and beyo

Design Interactive, Inc. (DI) proposes the development of a Phase II prototype for Asclepius, an artificially intelligent system for automatically interpreting combat casualty care scenes. Asclepius will be a force multiplier for combat medics performing prolonged field care, granting them more time to provide direct care and better access to data-driven decision support systems. Using a custom-built perception system, Asclepius analyzes medics, medical objects, and casualties in its field of view to identify what, when, and where medical procedures have been performed. Asclepius is hardware-agnostic, but the prototype will be developed to run on Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 and an ATAK-enabled smartphone in Phase II. The final system will be deployed on the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) and will seamlessly integrate with other military end-user devices (EUDs) and software such as the Battlefield Assisted Trauma Distributed Observation Kit (BATDOK), making it a completely hands-free solution. Critically, Asclepius will be designed to run only on the processing power available on military EUDs to facilitate its use in denied, intermittent, and low-bandwidth (DIL) comms environmen