APTIMA INC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: DHA17C-001

Description

Adverse physiological events (PEs) have plagued warfighters piloting military aircraft, in particular PEs involving hypoxia and cockpit cabin decompression. Though there has been a large variety of research performed in trying to understand the problems and why theyre caused, there are inefficiencies due to the lack of standardized cross-laboratory protocols, procedures, and metrics. To address this challenge, Aptima and partners at The University of CaliforniaSan Diego propose to develop AeroQUEST (Aeromedcial Quantified Understanding via Experimental Standards Toolkit). AeroQUEST will be a distributed system enabling aviation medicine and human performance researchers to implement essential actions to design studies, execute study designs, and analyze collected data and results in a standardized fashion. The system will include a dynamic user interface that allows researchers to design, compare, and contrast current study designs with that of other labs, allow researchers to interface with a standardized set of sensors for data collection via the HPML standard, and allow researchers to analyze and disseminate data and study designs across laboratories as necessary. When complete, the AeroQUEST system will ultimately contribute to bolstering the fidelity and replicability of studies across laboratories, which will ultimately lead to the development of mitigation strategies for PEs of interest.