APTIMA INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: N151-069

Description

Training-related injuries are a leading cause of preventable service member hospitalizations and outpatient visits. Aptima proposes FitForce Planner, which aims to research, develop, and design a capability for sensing, addressing, and acting to combat the musculoskeletal injury challenges facing Navy and Marine Corps personnel through optimization of physical fitness training. FitForce Planner aims to support USMC Force Fitness Instructors (FFIs) in creating and tailoring personalized physical training (PT) plans for their assigned Marine units. Presently, FFIs are limited in the extent to which they can personalize training according to individual Marine characteristics, and they lack automated methods for evaluating plan effectiveness. We propose to optimize force fitness with data-driven methods and a web-based physical training planning application that incorporates exercise physiology domain expertise, and deploys plans to Marines’ mobile devices for integrated feedback, tracking, and monitoring. FitForce Planner tracks readiness over time (per unit or Marine) with algorithms that learn successful plan characteristics for more informed, goal-directed recommendations. The objective in this effort is to maximize operational readiness and minimize injuries with individualized training determined from advanced recommendation algorithms based on sensor data, personalized inputs, and exercise history.