Background

A soldier's physical and psychological state degrades under combat conditions in ways that are not always visible or self-reported. Chronic and acute stress exposure impacts decision-making, situational awareness, and long-term wellbeing — yet existing wearable solutions (measuring heart rate variability, skin conductance, or movement) are built for civilian wellness tracking, not for extreme, unpredictable combat environments, and typically provide retrospective insights rather than actionable, real-time intelligence.

PROBLEM

The military needs a new generation of wearable-enabled systems that move from passive physiological tracking to real-time stress and readiness intelligence. How might we design a wearable technology and data pipeline that:

• Measures stress and readiness reliably in extreme, real-world combat conditions
• Surfaces the minimum viable stress signal a soldier can act on without cognitive overload — e.g. via wrist display, audio cue, or haptic feedback
• Aggregates individual, anonymised data into a dynamic team readiness overview for a platoon leader
• Transforms raw physiological data into actionable, decision-relevant output — supporting both combat performance and long-term wellbeing

in this project, the team will...

work with synthetic or simulated physiological datasets to design the signal processing and threshold logic, and prototype the user interface for both the individual soldier view and the platoon leader view. The deliverable is a working prototype demonstrating the full pipeline — from sensor input to decision-relevant output.