Award Data

High concentrations of supplemental oxygen are used routinely by pilots and divers prior to and during missions to prevent and treat decompression sickness, avoid detection during covert operations, and to support oxygenation following pulmonary injury. Due to pulmonary oxygen toxicity (PO2T), exposure limits are imposed to prevent damage to pulmonary tissues. Current policy focuses on preventing ...

Different regions of the human GI tract exhibit different chemical environments and different digestion metabolites. As a result, these regions support different microorganisms, with gradients in metabolic products along the length of the GI tract. Single-point measurements of microbiome metabolites (e.g. in feces) are insufficient to provide detailed information of physiological status because th ...

This expansion effort will enable SoarTech to harden the C-CHAT prototype for use during field exercises and increase the current 4 TRL to a 7 TRL. Working with partners at the USMC Field Medical Training Battalion (FMTB) and the University of Central Florida (UCF), we will enhance C-CHAT to run as a stand-alone application on a DoD-approved Android smartphone (e.g., the Samsung Galaxy S20 Tactica ...

Topic 17B-005 calls for a new process for supplying medical grade O2 without the use of O2 bottles or pressure (or vacuum) swing absorption (PSA) technology. This is significant to the military for several reasons, because these two sources currently interfere with logistical supply of O2 to where it is required, namely field hospital units. PSA units reportedly have limited shelf life and supply ...

Phytodetectors will design and engineer a synthetic biological pump circuit to increase the volume of water produced via photosynthetic desalination. This project builds off previous technology designed by Phytodetectors: a mangrove-inspired ultra-filter that allows plants to purify salt water as well as secrete water with properties comparable to bottled water. The partnership seeks to demonstrat ...

DARPA has identified an opportunity to leverage recent advances in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technology to develop a robust tool for distributed collaboration across a number of use cases.  That is a system for conducting collaborative meetings between users that can be anywhere and where the only limitation to participation is the availability of wireless network access.  ...

Virtual reality (VR) has long been touted as a new paradigm for interaction. Consumer grade virtual reality headsets now have sufficient resolution to read documents and a new wave of hand controllers can be used as virtual keyboards. With privacy protection and security a top concern for personal, business, and military applications, the design of VR hardware and systems is naturally conducive to ...

Military cockpits are flooded with multiple RF/EM signals and noise of varying frequencies and amplitudes.  Little is known, however, of the actual impacts of these fields on pilots, as no monitoring is currently performed. Consequently, no efforts have been made to shield pilots from these fields.  To address these unknown impacts on aircrew cognitive performance, Spotlight proposes to fully ch ...

There is potential for intense, pulsed and non-uniform electromagnetic fields (EMFs) to exist within DoD tactical aircraft, and the potential for such EMFs to degrade pilot performance and lead to serious mishaps including loss of life. Proposers will begin with a methodical study of the actual EMF environments in the cockpits of representative aircraft to establish nature of any extreme fields pr ...

Memory sticks are a convenient mechanism for portable data storage and transfer. Unfortunately, the embedded microcontroller required to present raw flash as a USB peripheral exposes an attack surface that can enable privilege escalation on a host computer even in the presence of tamper-resistant device designs, data encryption, and host protections such as anti-virus software. We propose Twi ...