WASHINGTON, Jan. 14, 2008 - While it still may be years away, military medical officials hope to one day place a sensor on every troop that would measure a blast’s impact and alert a combat medic to the possibility of a brain injury. The latest fielding of helmets fitted with blast sensors to troops deploying to combat could be the first step to gathering the data to support that technology, Michael J. Leggieri Jr., deputy coordinator for DoD’s Blast Injury Research Program Coordinating Office, said.
Brigades from the 101st Airborne and the 4th Infantry divisions will wear helmets fitted with sensors throughout their deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively. The sensors will record routine impact data, as well as any blasts, or ‘‘events,” to which the soldiers are exposed.
Leggieri is quick to point out that at this stage, however, the data will not be used in diagnosing or treating Soldiers. Still in its infancy, the technology’s first hurtle will be to prove that a sensor reading can be matched to an event, he said.
‘‘We need to figure out if we can actually, with some confidence, say that ‘Yes, these data are representative of an ... event.’ We don’t know that yet,” he explained.The sensor data will be recorded along with other operational data that is typically gathered after an event such as a bomb explosion. That data is entered into an intelligence database with the National Ground Intelligence Center that already is in use in the field. At the same time, if an injury occurred, patient data is recorded in a trauma registry also already in place.The two databases are kept separate, Leggieri said.
‘‘These helmet sensors, they are not medical devices. The data that they record are not medical data. So you can’t take, and we won’t allow anyone to take, the raw sensor data and make any kinds of decisions about medical treatment, or injuries or anything else,” Leggieri said. But, first things first, Leggieri said. What makes this project valuable, he explained, is that researchers will be able to gather actual impact data from soldiers in combat, as opposed to research conducted in a laboratory.
‘‘Right now we are getting an understanding of what happens out there — what kinds of impacts are the soldiers seeing — trying to understand that first, and then linking it to resulting injuries,” he said.
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