Sensing Using Physical and Psychological Observations for Rehabilitating Troops (SUPPORT)

SIFT has been awarded a contract called SUPPORT under OSD08-H06. SIFT partnered with Healthsense and the Brain Injury Association of Minnesota. Healthsense has developed a product line of comprehensive in home wellness monitoring and assistive technology systems called eNeighbor. The Brain Injury Association of Minnesota, who are intimately familiar with the implications of brain injuries and the needs of the effected individuals. SIFT proposes that innovative and technology rich solutions are needed to provide low cost and widely distributable methods to support soldiers with minor Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI). Soldiers recovering from mTBI have impaired performance in memory and problem solving tasks, which affects their activities of daily living (ADLs), and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs). SUPPORT employs an Intelligent reminding mechanisms to monitor user activities and act as a cognitive prosthetic to compensate for the human’s deficits in memory and task tracking. Smart home and monitoring technologies have already emerged as successful solutions for maintaining the independence of other populations such as the elderly. While the elderly and soldier populations are very different, there exist significant opportunities in adapting this technology to address the needs of recovering soldiers. SUPPORT combines smart home monitoring technologies with established theory from sociology and linguistics to create human-computer interactions designed to encourage treatment compliance and promote a therapeutic alliance between the end user and the system.