TIGER-2 Towards injury prediction using g-sensorbased strain estimation and motion reproduction
Abstract
APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASETIGER-2: Towards injury prediction using g-sensor-based strain estimation and motion reproductionBackground and significance: Military personnel experience a variety of injuries during their service. Compared with acute injuries like fractures, injuries that lead to chronic suffering like traumatic brain injury and back injury are difficult to treat. At present, protocols and preventative measures are crucial to reduce rates of incidence and prevent long-term suffering for warfighters. Technologies which can non-intrusively measure risk of injury can be transformative for the development of safety protocols. The proposed research will continue the development of tools to monitor the risk of injury in military exercises, in particular by addressing critical challenges related to promoting widespread adoption and efficacy of the technology.Rationale: It has been hypothesized that injury takes place through the creation of large strains in human tissue when thebody is subjected to high accelerations. Outside of a laboratory setting, in vivo tissue strains are generally not directly accessible during injury-inducing events, such as motorboat rides. We propose to apply the following indirect strategy to estimate strains/strain-rates in the brain and spine during motorboat rides: (a) We use wearable inertial measurement systems (including accelerometers or #g-sensors#) to measure kinematic information at various points on the head and body; (b) We model the head and body as an assembly of connected rigid bodies and calculate their approximate large-scale kinematics; and (c) We model the tissue at the sites of interest for injury prediction as deformable solids. We can then estimate strain by setting up computational continuum mechanics problems with the kinematics obtained in the previous steps,which provide the necessary boundary conditions and body forces for the problem. The calculated strains will be synthesized with the critical values for those quantities (provided by parallel efforts, e.g., PANTHER) to estimate the probability of injury.Objectiveand technical approaches: We plan to pursue three Specific Research Objectives: (i) Develop and implement a videography-based testmodule to assess the accuracy of wearable inertial measurement systems such as those developed as part of TIGER-1; (ii) Develop, manufacture, and test a new head-wearable inertial measurement system which can more easily integrate with existing military gear; and(iii) create support for the aforementioned risk of injury pipeline by developing computational tools for computing boundary conditions for human body models from inertial measurement data.Anticipated outcome of the research: The proposed research will provide improved confidence in the tools to measure the risk of injury in military exercises. These tools may be applied to design protocols to protect military personnel from injuries, for example during high speed motorboat operations.Such protocols, for instance, could dictate the operation of the motorboat, the protective gear that should be worn by the motorboat personnel, or the design of the seating or tethering apparatus used to fasten a person to the boat.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 24, 2023
- Source ID
- N000142312570
Entities
People
- Haneesh Kesari
Organizations
- Brown University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy