Continuous Assessment of Active-Duty Army Special Operations and Reconnaissance Marines Using Digital Devices and Custom Software: The Digital Comprehensive Operator Readiness Assessment (DcORA) Study.

BACKGROUND: Continuous exposure to extreme and chronic stress from uncontrollable events has been linked to increased psychological and physiological reactivity. Prolonged, frequent deployments may test coping skills over time, ultimately rendering Servicemembers vulnerable to mental health problems and suicide. This study develops a methodology for accurately collecting holistic health measures from Servicemembers using digital tools, including custom-built phone software and body-worn sensors. METHODS: The secure research platform and mobile app continuously collect multiple health measures and, after data analysis, deliver continuously updated summary data back to the Servicemember. This system provides novel insights into the relationships between the measures while helping individuals track their progress toward self-established goals. Participants were given an iPhone (including the study app) and an Apple Watch. Participants tracked their data for more than 6 months and responded to baseline, daily, and weekly questions and assessments. Physiologic, psychologic, and cognitive assessment data across the Preservation of the Force and Family program (POTFF) domains were collected, displayed to the individual, and analyzed in aggregate. RESULTS: When coupled with custom-built software, this hardware can be elevated from a fitness tracker to a user-facing health monitoring, educational, and delivery system. CONCLUSION: This wearable system measured vital factors associated with the health and human performance of Servicemembers. In real-time, it engaged Servicemembers in health and human performance optimization practices to achieve a goal of prevention of physical or mental injury.

Force plate assessments in reconnaissance marine training company.

The ability to obtain dynamic movement assessments using force plate technology holds the promise of providing more detailed knowledge of the strength, balance and forces generated by active-duty military personnel. To date, there are not well-defined use cases for implementation of force plate assessments in military training environments. We sought to determine if force plate technology assessments could provide additional insights, related to the likelihood of graduation, beyond that provided by traditional physical fitness tests (PFT's), in an elite Marine training school. Serial force plate measures were also obtained on those Marines successfully completing training to determine if consistent measures reflecting the effects of training on muscle skeletal load-over-time could be accurately measured. A pre-training force plate assessment performed in 112 Marines did not predict graduation rates. For Marines who successfully completed the course, serial measures obtained throughout training were highly variable for each individual and no firm conclusions could be drawn related to load imposed or the fitness attained during training.

Diverse predictors of early attrition in an elite Marine training school.

Reconnaissance Marine training is deliberately difficult, to assure that graduates have the capabilities required to function successfully in the high-risk military occupational specialty. The majority of training attrition is due to voluntary withdrawal and previous research has identified certain predictive factors such as demographics, mental status, and physical performance. While some characteristics of training attrition have been identified, there is still a lack of understanding related to an individual's profile that is more apt to complete Recon training. Retrospective survey data was analyzed from 3,438 trainees within the Reconnaissance Training Company. Surveys were related to trainees' military recruitment history and other military experience, prior life experience, athletic experience, self-identified personality characteristics and motivations, and reasons for voluntary withdrawal if applicable, as well as physical performance metrics. Various demographic factors, self-reported hobbies, motivations, aquatic experience, and physical performance were associated with success in Recon Marine training courses. Subjects who voluntarily withdrew from training most commonly cited mental stress and aquatic rigor as the reason and less commonly cited reasons were physical and family reasons. These results could potentially increase training success, but more research is needed to understand the relationships between the observed trainee characteristics and success in elite warfighter training.

Where are you? The effect of uncertainty and its visual representation on location judgments in GPS-like displays.

Two experiments revealed how nonexperts interpret visualizations of positional uncertainty on GPS-like displays and how the visual representation of uncertainty affects their judgments. Participants were shown maps with representations of their current location; locational uncertainty was visualized as either a circle (confidence interval) or a faded glyph (indicating the probability density function directly). When shown a single circle or faded glyph, participants assumed they were located at the center of the uncertain region. In a task that required combining 2 uncertain estimates of their location, the most common strategy-integration-was to take both estimates into account, with more weight given to the more certain estimate. Participants' strategies were not affected by how uncertainty was visualized, but visualization affected the consistency of responses, both within individuals and in relation to models of individual's preferred strategies. The results indicate that nonexperts have an intuitive understanding of uncertainty. Rather than arguing for a particular method of visualizing uncertainty, the data suggest that the best visualization method is task dependent. (PsycINFO Database Record