High Fidelity Digital Human Models for Protective Equipment Design

Today the evaluation methods employed in the development and assessment of soldier borne Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) system designs are often extremely slow, expensive, and complex, resulting in significant delays and expense in the fielding of improved designs. Recent rapid advancements in digital human modeling now allow the development of a multi-scale, comprehensive PPE evaluation tool, which will provide operational, performance, and injury assessments, and will facilitate design development and optimization. We propose utilizing the Santos digital human model as the foundation for this tool, and believe it will allow for a tremendous improvement in the speed and efficiency of PPE development and fielding. Program objectives are to create the integration framework and protocols allowing multiple third-party simulation and modeling components to work seamlessly within the Santos platform, and to execute the integration of several of the most important of these components, including soft armor models, casualty prediction capabilities, and design capabilities. In Phase I we will develop a proposed architecture for the integration framework including a systems engineering strategy; explore new armor-system design capabilities; assess the feasibility of proposed levels of potential component integration; and demonstrate component integration using the CPAT ballistic effectiveness assessment tool.