Award Data

Blast induced Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a major threat to the health of military personnel serving in modern theaters. As such, the biomechanical injury pathways of TBI are, and have been, the focus of many animal studies. However, differences in the experimental setups across laboratories make it difficult to draw definitive conclusions from the resulting data. A tool that can accurately es ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Ship groundings can cause sever environmental damage to the delicate ecosystems such as coral reefs, seagrass beds, and beaches. At present, survey work is performed by hand – a method that is inefficient and difficult to perform reliably. Improved bottom survey tools are clearly needed to evaluate the extent and type of damage and assist in determining remediation efforts. ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: NOAA and the National Weather Service maintain an immense network of automated maritime, surface, and upper-air observing stations throughout the world and at great expense. These automated stations provide regularly updated data for both short-term weather prediction and long-term climate models. Maritime and surface observations occur as frequently as every 10 to 20 minutes, ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Creare proposes to develop a self-sustained small-scale power conversion system to power NOAA’s weather monitoring network stations located in harsh uninhabited locations. Our miniature heat engine will take advantage of the existing year-round thermal gradients found between water and air in Arctic regions. Our baseline approach is the development of a compact Turbo-Rankine ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Bottom Feeder will be a highly maneuverable Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), with a tethered operations option and modular sensor bay, to support benthic optical surveys, coral reef mapping and health assessment, and be expandable for future survey operations. It will integrate a low drag hullform, a minimum of four degrees of independent motion control, a highly efficient ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: The objective of this project is to develop and implement a real-time detection and warning system to mitigate marine entanglement events in offshore aquaculture operations. In order to achieve this, we leverage the latest advances in computer vision, deep learning, and real-time object detection to develop a real-time marine life detection, classification and tracking pipeline ...

The nature of military operations leads to high noise levels, exposing personnel to the possibility of noise induced hearing loss (NIHL). Individual hearing monitoring is conducted yearly which can only provide a record of the progression of irreversible hearing loss with limited options for intervention and mitigation. Furthermore, there is limited data that links actual, real-world noise exposur ...

Hearing loss is the third most common chronic physical condition in the U.S.more prevalent than diabetes or cancer. Globally, in 2015, about one half billion people had disabling hearing loss, or roughly 6 to 8% of the world population. Occupational hearing loss is one of the most common work-related illnesses and the most common service-related disability among veterans. As a result, more individ ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Ensuring the health of coastal marine ecosystems has emerged as one of the primary environmental concerns of this century. Frequent monitoring of water quality is required to establish baseline levels and enable early detection of problems. Citizen science programs have been shown to provide a highly effective method of monitoring water quality. Creare is developing an open-sou ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Commercial marine aquaculture operators face many operational hazards including disease, predators, husbandry operations, and environmental changes. Most of theses risks are only identified with constant surveillance and physical presence at a farm site. However, human observation of risk factors is expensive, slow, and sometimes ineffective. Sensors are available to monitor in ...