The Defense Department is about to start a field experiment to determine if data collected in a helmet-mounted sensor can help in the treatment of traumatic brain injury.
More than 3,000 soldiers of the First Brigade Combat Team Fourth Infantry Division are about to be deployed to Iraq equipped with small, internally-mounted helmet sensors.
Testing of the data collected by the sensor, which weighs about an ounce, will be conducted by DOD’s Blast Injury Research Program in Fort Detrick, Md.
“Our job is to try to make sense out of the data,” said Mike Leggieri, the program’s deputy director, who said his unit has yet to receive any sensor data.
“We view this as a first attempt to see if we can actually record useful data that indicates exposure to blast or blunt impact.”
In conjunction with the deployment of the sensors, the program is setting up laboratory experiments in an effort to predict how certain events will be recorded by the accelerometer contained in the sensor.
The accuracy of these predictions will be verified through other operational data that is collected. For example, if sensor data appears to indicate exposure to a blast, that fact will be established through independent operational data from the field.
“We have to be able to distinguish between different kinds of events,” said Leggieri. “As we gain confidence in the data, we will be able to tell if the helmet was subject to blunt impact or if it was merely dropped on the ground.”
If all goes well, Leggieri expects a number of benefits to flow to the warfighter. First, it will be a means of identifying soldiers exposed to blast for medical evaluation. Second, it could provide a link between injuries and outcomes.
“You can establish correlations between insult and the resulting injury,” Leggieri said. “The data can indicate the probability of injury.
“The sensor is not going to be used as a diagnostic tool,” he added. “The data will indicate which soldiers were exposed and who need to see a physician to be evaluated.”
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
