Charles River Analytics Helps Soldiers with Situational Awareness

Charles River Analytics Inc. has received funding from the US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences to build its Physiological Index of Situation Awareness (PISA) system with SA Technologies. The unobtrusive, multimodal, and real-time PISA system monitors soldiers’ evolving situational awareness (SA) and determines when lapses in SA occur.

Soldiers must operate in increasingly complex and chaotic battlespaces, partially due to unreliable intelligence, such as a false message from an adversary or information denied environments.

“To perform their jobs and fight effectively, soldiers must develop the necessary skills to attain and maintain SA for their assigned tasks,” said Dr. Bethany Bracken, Principal Scientist at Charles River Analytics and Principal Investigator on the PISA effort. “PISA includes breakthrough wearables sensors that decode the physiological correlates of soldier’s evolving SA in real time, making it easier for commanders to intervene during a training simulation to tailor trainings to be optimally effective.”

Charles River’s PISA system includes a minimally invasive multimodal sensor suite, including functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), electroencephalography (EEG), eye tracking, and cardiac sensors. PISA uses Sherlock, its open and extensible software and hardware platform, to process and fuse this sensor data and derive informative variables related to SA in real time. Then, Charles River leverages its probabilistic modeling and machine learning expertise to estimate soldiers’ cognitive state, such as SA.