New App to Use Smartphone Capabilities in Battlefield

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While Intel ceases development on several wearable devices and shutting down its New Devices Group (NDG) in Israel, the US Pentagon has been advancing the development of a software that uses smartphone sensors to continuously monitor health. A new app is being created for the Pentagon to keep track of a soldier’s health on the battlefield. The software will harvest data from cameras, light sensors, pedometers, fingerprint sensors, and other sensors to make its evaluations. The technology recruits smartphones for the continuous, passive health, and readiness assessment.

Funded by secretive weapons development agency DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the military technology is likely to become publicly available in the not too distant future. DARPA awarded $5.1 million to the cybersecurity firm Kryptowire in order to develop the app to monitor health continuously and in real time. It’s part of DARPA’s funded warfighter analytics using smartphones for health program, also known as Wash.

According to dailymail.co.uk, the app will passively collect smartphone sensor measurements to provide real-time monitoring of a soldier’s health, as well as detecting biomarkers for early disease diagnosis.

It aims to allow intervention in medical issues before a patient has to visit a doctor or nurse due to symptoms developing.

Wash seeks to use data collected from smartphone sensors to enable specially created algorithms to analyze their measurements. The objective of Wash is to extract physiological signals, which may be weak and noisy, that are embedded in the data obtained through existing mobile device sensors.

The company will reportedly test the software on soldiers but it could one day be used by the public

However, the privacy implications of the app, being built for Android and iOS, are of concern to experts and will still have to be examined.