Dismounted warfighters often experience physiological strain close to their physiological limits in their missions, such as patrolling in a desert in high temperatures or venturing through high mountain terrain with a restricted oxygen supply. The physiological strain experienced by a warfighter not only affects his/her performance but may lead to injury or even death. Therefore, in this paper, investigations were performed to develop a systematic procedure for predicting an individual warfighter’s physiological status, that includes (a) Environment set-up, to identify geolocation and to determine the environmental conditions for a mission; (b) Warfighter modeling and simulation, to create a digital human model for an individual warfighter and to replicate his/her mission activities by animating the model using motion capture data; (c) Physical activity energy expenditure analysis, to calculate the metabolic energy required for a warfighter to undertake his mission tasks based on the inverse kinematics of his/her body motion; and (d) Physiological status prediction: to predict the status for an individual warfighter based on his personal physical/physiological characteristics, environmental conditions, and activity intensity represented by the rate of metabolic energy required. An initial software system was developed to implement the procedure and to provide basic capabilities for the prediction. Case studies were performed to test and demonstrate the functions of the software system.
This work is supported by the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command under Contract Number W81XWH18C0102. The views, opinions and/or findings contained in this report are those of the authors and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy or decision unless so designated by other documentation.