From Defense One:

The US Military’s Latest Wearables Can Detect Illness Two Days Before You Get Sick

Some 400 troops are testing the devices, trained on nearly a quarter million cases to detect COVID and a whole lot more.

Some troops in the U.S. military are wearing a watch and ring kit that can alert them and their command if they’re going to get sick in the next day or two. It’s part of a new system that the Defense Innovation Unit, or DIU, has built with Philips Healthcare and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, or DTRA.

The watch and ring — by Garmin and Oura, respectively — are commercially available; they detect subtle biometric indicators, like slight changes in skin temperature. But a new algorithm, trained on Philips’ massive cache of patient bedside data, can analyze the data and predict whether the wearer will soon become ill from any of a wide variety of diseases, including COVID-19.

Called Rapid Analysis of Threat Exposure, or RATE, the system can’t tell you exactly what you have, but can tell you the likelihood, on a scale of 1 to 100, that a sick day is ahead.

“Originally, this wasn’t designed for COVID-19, but the algorithm was trained against some SARS variants, of which COVID-19 is one,” said Dr. Christian Whitchurch, who runs the human systems portfolio at DIU. “We trained this algorithm on something like a quarter-million patient records. These are folks that went into the hospital for an elective surgery…and then became unwell.”

The researchers identified six markers that allowed the Philips-made algorithm to provide a 48-hour heads-up, before the wearer even feels sick in most instances.

“We are pivoting this hospital-developed model into the context of a warfighter using commercially available wearable tech,” said Whitchurch.

In June, DIU and DTRA began giving the kits to about 400 people.. “Within two weeks of us going live we had our first successful COVID-19 detect” — that is, an indication that the wearer was unwell, which led to a further diagnostic test the revealed COVID-19, he said. “That was amazing.”

The program is now expanding to some 5,000 participants, including across the Navy, Veteran Affairs, West Point cadets, and “other Department of Defense entities,” according to a press release.

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https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2020/09/militarys-latest-wearables-can-detect-illness-two-days-you-get-sick/168664/