Operational Readiness and Cognitive Assessment System (ORCAS)
The Problem:
Fatigue, inattentiveness, and other diving-related conditions can lead to human error, which can jeopardize missions, destroy equipment, and cause injury or, in extreme cases, loss of life. The diver's management of physical health and cognitive readiness is challenged by battle stress and operating in remote locations without access to advanced medical resources. The situation is further complicated as individual divers have varying tolerances from day to day.
Current technologies offer clinicians no way to monitor physiological indicators in real time.
Our Solution:
Today's best technology allows physiological information to be evaluated after the event. This allows the Navy, Duke University, the Diver's Alert Network (DAN), Florida State University, and others on the cutting edge of undersea physiology no real-time evaluative ability or detailed and coordinated after-the-fact event playback that could help them learn more and prevent future problems. The development of ORCAS aims to provide the next generation of tools to today's clinicians.
Our solution begins with our extensible, multi-sensory system – the Cognitive Avionics Tool Set (CATS) – which serves as the framework for ORCAS. Although the system was designed for use by pilots, most of the sensors directly transfer to the hyperbaric environment.
Also, the extensible architecture of the plug-and-play system allows us to add sensors at will. CATS is designed to collect multi-sensory data, properly synchronize it, unify it with environment condition data, apply artifact removal and noise reduction techniques, and, in the future, perform diver state classifications.
ORCAS - effectiveness in the water:
- Training: In the training environment, these sensors provide inputs to improve trainer effectiveness and reduce training injuries and accidents.
- Offshore/repair divers: ORCAS offers a more diver-centric view of safety by delivering diver information, allowing command to supplement existing dive algorithms with real-time diver state information. Based on this, the divemaster will have more physiologically based information on which to base decisions. This could raise safety and productivity, especially when conditions and workload are more variable.
- Combat divers: ORCAS could alert a corpsman on the team to problems with another diver. Early problem-identification can keep the diver safe and the mission on track.
- NCW: In accordance with network-centric warfare (NCW) goals, ORCAS will allow the integration of an entire dive team, allowing command to assess diver state to facilitate task assignment.
- Dive medicine: Clinicians will have the ability to "replay" accidents and injuries, giving them valuable information they can then use to prevent future injury and create more precise dive tables and other dive physiology algorithms.
- Product R&D: By examining information from ORCAS, manufacturers can make equipment that more specifically addresses usability and safety.
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