In September Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne announced that DST Group, in partnership with industry, will develop a data recorder system for the individual soldier.
The two-year, $700 million initiative under DST’s Next Generation Technologies Fund, will see South Australian-based Myriota and NZ SME IMeasureU team with DST to begin development.
The system has been called the Fight Recorder, a tribute to the aircraft Flight Recorder, which was also developed by the forebears of today’s DST Group many years ago. The initiative is one of the first examples of the work being undertaken under the auspices of the Next Gen Technologies Fund, launched by the Australian government in March, and the Small Business Innovation Research for Defence (SBIRD) scheme.
Fight Recorder
The Fight Recorder system is in its very early stages of development, but is intended to provide the dismounted soldier with a small passive recording device, which will store a certain amount of data about the soldier’s location and movement, but which can also be used as a high-tech emergency beacon should the wearer become wounded in action.
When he launched the initiative, Minister Pyne noted that survival rates for battlefield casualties are closely tied to response times, the so-called ‘golden hour’, and the Fight Recorder will allow the rapid location and treatment of wounded soldiers.
In addition to acting as an emergency locator beacon, the Fight Recorder may also be capable of transmitting a small amount of data, which could be used in triage decisions by Army medical personnel.
The data passively stored within the unit will also be able to be analysed after an operation and used in the future development of protective clothing, such as the body armour worn by individual soldiers, or to better understand how an injury occurred by analysing the soldier’s movements before, during and even after the event.
Concept development
DST Group acting chief S&T Program Dr Nick Beagley explained to ADM that the Fight Recorder concept came about after the emergence of technologies which made to feasible to study the possibility of providing some form of emergency beacon on the individual warfighter. These technologies, coupled with the miniaturisation of data capture and analysis, could also be used to obtain an insight into how the incident occurred in the first place.
“Within DST we saw the potential for this emerging ability to miniaturise the technology and house satellite communications capability in a very small package,” he said. “But also to utilise emerging data analysis techniques to take advantage of the opportunity to gather motion data on the individual, for the purpose of better understanding the threats that they are exposed to and provide extra insights for future protection of those individuals.”
The work being done with start-up telecommunications SME Myriota and IMeasureU, a wearable technology company, will develop prototype systems to inform future decisions about commercialising the technology, with a view to Fight Recorder entering production for the Australian Army.
“When we developed the concept, we discussed it with our partners within Army and they saw merit in exploring that technology further,” Dr. Beagley explained to ADM. “It’s recognised that this is very early in the development phase and we’re looking into the feasibility of these technologies to come together in a small package that doesn’t introduce a burden on the wearer. The first and primary purpose of this is to provide that emergency beacon, but the ability to gather data gives us an added depth and value to the system. The idea of it being a passive, non-communicating, system up until you need to activate it in an emergency is a core principle.”
Dr Beagley says that the types of sensors under consideration at the present time focus on motion data and include tri-axial accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers, which would measure the data and record it for future analysis.
Industry engagement
The Next Generation Technologies Fund, managed by DST Group, is government initiative to focus on research and development into new and emerging technologies and the Fight Recorder concept fits within the enhanced human performance theme of the 2016 White Paper.
“The concept was proposed against that theme and we reached an agreement to pursue it through industry contracts, via the SBIRD program. Basically this was the first of our SBIRD submissions and we posted two special notices on the Defence Innovation Portal on the internet, because we wanted to pursue a hardware demonstrator and the analytics to convert this motion data into an event reconstruction,” Dr Beagley said.
“Essentially we were looking at the scientific excellence of each bid, the innovation of their approach to solving the requirements of the special notices and their approach towards partnering, because there is a strong emphasis on partnering in the way DST and Defence are approaching innovation. We were looking for people prepared to partner both with us and with others.
“We were also looking for partners who were prepared to invest their own resources in achieving the goals.”
Responses were received from 47 companies throughout Australia and NZ and a shortlist of seven was selected to develop a more detailed proposal, before the Myriota and IMeasureU were declared the eventual winners. The two companies will share $700,000 of Next Generation Technologies funding over the next two years and, together with DST Group, the aim is to produce an initial hardware prototype and conduct some data gathering activities early next year.
It is hoped that this will lead to the production of an evolved prototype, which takes the initial testing into account, together with validated analysis tools for the event reconstruction, in early 2019. The current programme is due to conclude at the end of the 2019 financial year.
“From there it depends on the progress made my Myriota and IMeasureU and, hopefully we will have moved up the technology readiness levels (TRL) scale and Fight Recorder may be suitable as a bid into the innovation hub for further development into a commercialised product,” Dr Beagley concluded.
This article first appeared in the November 2017 edition of ADM.