Eccrine Systems, Inc. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF161-047

Description

ABSTRACT: Warfighters are exposed to many forms of significant stress both sporadically throughout the day and accumulating across long periods of time, which can affect human performance and operational effectiveness. Perhaps often overlooked are the impacts of dehydration on cognitive performance, as even mild dehydration impairs performance related to attention, psychomotor, and immediate memory, all of which are critical functions to the warfighter operating in any environment. Continuous, real-time, quantitative monitoring of dehydration connected to cognitive function would be invaluable to mitigation and management strategies of at-risk warfighters and human operators.To be truly useful to the warfighter, dehydration monitoring would require real-time, non-invasive measurement of definitive dehydration biomarkers shown to correlate with cognitive impairment, a feat yet to be commercially realized. Eccrine Systems proposes analyzing human sweat samples from an ongoing dehydration-cognition study to, for the first time, correlate biomarkers in sweat to dehydration-induced cognitive impairment and develop a dehydration-cognition algorithm. Having proven the feasibility of the approach, will build on its Sweatronics Platform to design a system for monitoring, noninvasively and in real-time, and reporting dehydration status and its cognitive impact as part of a user dashboard relating cognitive state information to the warfighter and related users and systems.; BENEFIT: The creation of a real-time, objective monitoring system to manage the impact of dehydration on cognitive function will have broad impact on airmen, improving situation awareness, decision-making, mission planning, and overall airman task performance. Additionally, broad commercial applications for a wearable dehydration-monitoring device exist in professional athletics, industrial workforce, personal health, and medical applications. Correlating dehydration-monitoring to cognitive function expands these markets, and greatly increases their value proposition. Combined, even with modest adoption levels, these applications represent a multi-billion dollar market opportunity.