Researchers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, or ARL continue to expand body armor analysis work to offer protection to Soldiers – not just protecting their lives, but in addition their lifestyle functions after treatment and recovery.
The team of researchers, who work within the Warfighter Survivability Branch of ARL’s Survivability Lethality Analysis Directorate, implement methodology to raised understand and analyze the protecting capability of body armor, both relating to mitigating injury and life changing outcomes. For instance, eye injuries have a low level at the threat to life scale but are very significant in the case of quality of life and the Soldier’s ability to accomplish military tasks. The addition of latest injury outcome metrics provides a way of scoring and quantifying protection in multiple meaningful dimensions.
“Current ballistic protection continues to excel at protecting our Soldiers,” said Rebecca VanAmburg, electrical engineer. “So there was a paradigm shift not only to concentrate on threat to life, but other dimensions of damage to boot. By performing survivability analysis that examines the multiple dimensional aspects of trauma, we will be able to best continue to optimize how we protect and likewise very importantly, how we communicate these protection levels in meaningful ways.”
Soldiers’ quality of life is a primary piece.
“We are using the models we have already got and characterizing injury and classifying them,” said Patrick Gillich, personnel methodology team leader. “We always care about Soldiers’ threat to life – injury and dying, but what about quality of life and daily function? We’re concentrating on the straightforward things all of us take as a right – the easy daily function tasks.”
There are four steps within the body armor analysis process. First, they appear on the physical body armor and the way it fits at the Soldier. Then the armor is modeled on their human model. Next, the human model fitted with body armor is modeled in a threat environment. Because the final step, they perform analysis to see the armors effectiveness in a threat environment.
Team member Latrice Hall enhanced the Army’s current methodology for performing personnel vulnerability methodology by incorporating quality of life measures. She proofed the implementation of this new analytical capability and has communicated it to DoD’s test and evaluation community.
“I implemented the metrics Rebecca uses and performed studies to assist us understand the impact that the addition of latest dimensions have on our analysis,” said Hall. “It’s important to accomplish comprehensive testing to examine the standard of the result to make sure it’s accurate.”
The importance of this research is to repeatedly communicate the protecting capability of body armor to developers in a way that easily quantifies the diversities between systems. With their analysis, small area of coverage changes should be shown to have a vital increase in quality of life outcomes.
These analyses were utilized in the verdict to field Army plate carriers, neck protection, and urogenital protection.
“The it’s because we do that is we wish to have the ability to help the Soldier stay in his or her job and help them return to their daily lives when they are injured,” said Gillich.
The team continues to target protecting other parts of the body, which can limit lower level injuries which have an important effect on quality of life.
“We also are gazing other parts of the body – along with the urogenital region and the forearm,” said VanAmburg. “When evaluating the necessity for extra body armor we determine which metric most effectively evaluates the wounds sustained in that body area. As an instance, when evaluating the necessity for ballistic undergarments, it was important not to only assess the wounds sustained in that body region, but in addition how those injuries affect the Soldier’s quality of life.”
The goal of each researcher at ARL is to make certain the Army’s Soldiers are the appropriate trained and most lethal and well protected on this planet. VanAmburg supports that goal and said, “We are using our expertise to quantify the protecting capability of body armor that protects Soldiers. We can assess several dimensions of damage to supply meaningful analysis to the body armor community.”
ARL is a part of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, which has the mission to develop technology and engineering solutions for America’s Soldiers.
RDECOM is a tremendous subordinate command of the U.S. Army Materiel Command. AMC is the Army’s premier provider of materiel readiness-technology, acquisition support, materiel development, logistics power projection and sustainment-to the entire force, around the spectrum of joint military operations. If a Soldier shoots it, drives it, flies it, wears it, eats it or communicates with it, AMC provides it.
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