Life on the Edge: The Next Generation of Human Performance Technology in the Tactical Environment?

The Tactical Athlete Leadership Board brings together the leading voices in human performance - including practitioners, researchers and technology vendors - to share knowledge and experience so as to improve the health and performance of warfighters today and into the future.

With the explosion of human performance technology in both the elite sports and consumer domain, the Board has particularly focused on how those technologies could be applied to the tactical environment. 

However, the adoption of consumer fitness and wellness devices presents plenty of pitfalls for those operating in the tactical space. For instance, in 2018 Strava, an online exercise tracker, was revealed to be inadvertently disclosing sensitive military locations and patterns of life information through their heat mapping tool. This breach was a wakeup call. Military leadership swiftly enacted new policies and increased diligence on the types of devices that are approved for usage.

Today, increased investment into human performance across the armed forces has led to the identification and exploration of new technologies that look to optimize warfighter readiness, resiliency and recovery. But this new wave of human performance technology comes with its own considerations and concerns around data architecture and security.

Since the original Strava incident, the global cloud computing market has more than doubled in size according to some estimates. Government continues to develop and adapt policy to keep up with the changing face of technology. This includes launching the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) to standardize security risk assessments and authorizations for cloud products, as well as the launch of government cloud offerings from major hosting providers like Amazon and Microsoft.

While many wearables may allow for individual users to track their data and view insights on personal mobile devices, the vast majority depend on the cloud to consolidate data from multiple devices in order to provide visibility and insights for commanders and other stakeholders. This reliance on sending data back to the cloud in order for it to be actionable presents a risk when it comes to signal emissions. 

For deployed naval vessels, either surface fleet or underwater, satellite connectivity is at a premium and needs to be strategically prioritized in international or unfriendly waters. While there is a strong desire to track sailor sleep and fatigue to support watchstanding, the requirement for that data to be aggregated in the cloud before providing actionable intelligence back to the ship could be a barrier, especially if operational needs lead to delays in the data communication process.

Technology advancements with edge computing offer the ability for data to be collected, processed and analyzed with local, onboard hubs. These edge nodes could be embedded with the capability to aggregate and analyze collected data as well as offer a presentation layer to handle the immediate needs of making watchstanding decisions. Connection back to the cloud can be done when convenient (for example, when the vessel is pier-side) for more longitudinal tracking and analysis as well as long-term data storage. 

For the most part, human performance technology solutions have not incorporated edge computing into their data framework, as they have been built first for the elite sport environment. But as the value of leveraging edge computing continues to grow, new use cases will be unlocked with future adoption and iteration of human performance technology.