Extreme Resiliency Monitored for Army Troop Training

While training for 11 days in Alaska in temperatures that some nights dropped as low as -40 degrees (Fahrenheit and Celsius), soldiers of the US Army 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, wore a device to measure their physiological data for strain, sleep and recovery.

“We’re hoping to provide insight into how the personal, psychological and situational factors interact to produce either adaptive and maladaptive stress responses of military personnel who are operating in these really extreme arctic temps,” said Kristen Holmes, Vice President of Performance Science for WHOOP, the Boston, Massachusetts-based company which makes the personal fitness monitoring device.

Extended Reality technologies are delivering dramatic advances in capability at increasingly affordable prices. Find out more in  Emerging X-Realities.

“It’s not just the temperatures, but the darkness,” Holmes noted. “I think what we really want to understand is, these folks are already really resilient, but how does stress manifest and is it manifesting in an adaptive or a maladaptive way?”

The device measures body strain and psychological stress, and tracks sleep to determine recovery. Among the measurements are resting heart rate, heart rate variability and respiratory rate during sleep.

Over six months, the wearable device will collect data on internal and external stressors for the 1,000 soldiers, accessible through a smartphone app. Commanders can see an aggregate of data to determine the well-being of the unit.

Leaders can review the data to understand what it takes for soldiers to recover and make changes to improve resiliency during future training, according to CWO4 Phillip Ranck, a project manager with SPARwerx, an innovation hub at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage. SPARwerx is collaborating with the University of Queensland in Australia on the analysis.