Damage Sensing in Electrotextiles for Bodily Injury Prediction

The Defense Health Agency (DHA) has identified electrotextiles as a potential means of unobtrusively monitoring health and detecting injury events for military personnel. As such, DHA seeks to understand how e-textile constructs might be best leveraged to sense potential injury events such that individualized care may be administered to support both in-combat self-sufficiency and long-term resiliency and quality of life. This Phase II SBIR program will build on Mantel's successful Phase I SBIR program to further develop a medical simulation capable of inferring likely bodily injury based on detected changes in an e-textile system. Mantel will expand its Phase I model to further refine algorithms for use in designing e-textile sensor systems and will develop a test fixture system capable of supporting a wide range of test scenarios. Approaches to using e-textile to detect and discern between medically-relevant combat events and conditions will be demonstrated.