Design Interactive, Inc. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A22-005

Description

On today’s technological battlefield, Soldiers are pushed to accomplish cognitively demanding tasks while experiencing stress, sleep deprivation, and varying emotional states. There exists great potential for the Army to embrace human-AI collaboration and implement adaptive automation in cognitively demanding tasks. Adaptive automation aims to provide assistive aids to humans precisely when needed, but this requires a roust and reliable method of triggering. Physiological sensors provide continuous, objective data which can be used as a triggering source for automated aids; however, research is needed to determine which physiological measures can be sensed, processed, and used as triggers, and technological development is needed to integrate an ecosystem of physiological sensors and apply adaptive thresholding. Design Interactive, Inc. (DI) proposes the development of the Biosignature Evaluation and Analytics Toolkit – Adaptive Automation (BEAT-2A). DI will leverage the existing BEAT system architecture and develop an adaptive automation module to further classify physiological data into cognitive states and provide individualized thresholding for adaptive triggering. The BEAT-2A software-hardware system will sense and process a user’s physiological state providing just-in-time triggering to improve task performance. BEAT-2A will be open to integration with a variety of systems where triggers are needed for automated aids.