Machine learning, sensor suites to improve situational awareness
NewsFebruary 26, 2020
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Charles River Analytics Inc., developer of intelligent systems solutions, has received funding from the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences to build the Physiological Index of Situation Awareness (PISA) system with SA Technologies. The unobtrusive, multimodal, and real-time PISA system monitors soldiers’ evolving situational awareness (SA) and determines when lapses in SA occur.
Soldiers must operate in increasingly complex and chaotic battlespaces, partially due to unreliable intelligence, such as a false message from an adversary or information denied environments. The PISA system is designed to present a continuous measure of SA over time, then identify new training opportunities to address known SA problems during training simulations before they occur in the battlefield.
According to the company, the PISA system includes a minimally invasive multimodal sensor suite, including functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), electroencephalography (EEG), eye tracking, and cardiac sensors to increase the awareness of the warfighter.
PISA uses Sherlock, the company's open and extensible software and hardware platform, to process and fuse this sensor data and derive informative variables related to SA in real time. Then probabilistic modeling and machine learning is leveraged to estimate cognitive states.
