US Army Repurpose Goggles to Check Temperatures of Soldiers

To combat COVID-19, the U.S. Army Future Command's Soldier Lethality Cross Functional Team (CFT) repurposed a prototype of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS). The system is being employed now to rapidly assess the temperature of hundreds of soldiers each day as they prepare for training on an installation that hosts thousands of soldiers in dozens of courses, including basic training and Ranger School.

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"A week ago, we were talking about the potentialimpacts of the pandemic on the IVAS program. Today we're talking about thepotential impacts of IVAS on the pandemic," said Brig. Gen. Dave Hodne,the director of the Army Future Command's Soldier Lethality Cross FunctionalTeam at Fort Benning, where he also serves as the Infantry School commandant.

As the commandant of the Infantry School, Hodne isresponsible for these soldiers and eager to use IVAS to mitigate trainingdelays where possible and to stem the spread of the virus when detected.

"That's the genius of this system; we can use thistechnology today to fight the virus, even as we shape it into the combat systemour soldiers need tomorrow. This shows the extensibility of the IVAS technologyand the system," said Brig Gen Tony Potts, the Program Executive OfficerSoldier at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where next-generation capabilities are beingdeveloped for the purpose of restoring the overmatch to U.S. forces.

"While we're maintaining momentum in pursuit of modernization,we have to keep in mind that readiness today is critical," he said.

IVAS is the Soldier Lethality CFT's signature modernizationeffort, a high-speed goggle designed by Microsoft using the Microsoft HoloLenswith a "heads up display" that will improve soldiers' situationalawareness without requiring them to take their eyes off the objective. Lastweek, Hodne announced the schedule remains on track to start fielding it totroops in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021, after supply-chain issueswrought by COVID-19 forced the IVAS team to shift various design and studyphases to the left and right.

About that same time last week, Tom Bowman was watching newsabout the pandemic at home in Virginia, when it occurred to him that thedigital thermal sensors in IVAS could be adapted to detect a fever.

Bowman is the director of IVAS Science & TechnologySpecial Project Office with the C5ISR's Night Vision Laboratory at FortBelvoir. C5ISR is one of the organizations that comprise the Army modernizationenterprise and a partner to the Microsoft team that agreed to "tweak"software into an application that would expand the capability of the system.

Four days later, the first IVAS fever detection devices wereshipped to Fort Benning, Georgia, where Bowman and his team of experts trained1st Battalion, 29th Infantry Regiment soldiers to use them.

The goggles they use are familiar to those who followed theevolution of the IVAS prototypes through Soldier Touch Point (STP) 2 last fall,a high-visibility event at Fort Pickett, Virginia, that demonstrated theutility and acceptability of the goggle in various combat operationalenvironments.

The STP 2 prototypes are not ruggedized military formfactor, as the final version will be, so they cannot be used outdoors wheretemperatures continually fluctuate for the purpose of fever detection just yet,Bowman said. Operations were conducted indoors on main post using commercialthermal reference sources to calibrate the imager to room temperature, anecessary condition for establishing baseline conditions for comparison.

Day after day and through the weekend, soldiers in groups ofmore than 200 and 300 filed through the processing center, where they pausedfor five seconds facing a soldier wearing an IVAS goggle with sensors thatdetect the forehead and inner eye temperature. The soldier's temperatureregistered in the operator's see-through, heads-up display, a method thatproves more economical and sanitary than the use of traditional thermometers.

Anyone who registered a fever was moved to a medical stationon site for evaluation. After every tenth soldier, the system was recalibratedto maintain accuracy, a process that takes mere seconds. From start to finish,a group of roughly 300 Soldiers was processed and cleared in less than 30minutes.

"We've always planned for an agile software system anda digital platform that can be upgraded and adapted to use against emergingthreats in the future. No one anticipated the next threat to emerge would be avirus, but that's the enemy we face today," said Bowman, who brought aspecial team to Fort Benning to tackle the pandemic while the rest of the teamdrives on with design and testing.

The fever detection operation, which proved successful fromday one, underscores the value of the IVAS rapid development, which centers onan iterative design-test-refine process, Potts said. The program is a middletier acquisition rapid prototyping effort, which requires the program to yieldresidual capabilities like the sensors that enabled the fever detection technology,which can be employed, for instance, on Family of Weapon Sights - Individual Familyof Weapon Sights - Individual.