Smart Non-Invasive Assays of Physiology (SNAP) Proposers Day

The United States warfighter needs to always be ready to respond to threats and mission needs, ready to answer the call. Decreased readiness of an individual warfighter can pose grave risks to the health of not only that individual but also to fellow warfighters, as well as to the chance of mission success. However, readiness is an ambiguous term without context to the physiological and cognitive demands of the task or mission. Because of the diversity of warfighter roles and associated tasks, defining readiness, even within the military, remains challenging. No single definition of readiness will suffice for all possible military tasks. Therefore, for the purposes of this program, we define readiness as a prediction of an individual warfighter’s performance, relative to their peak, in one or more tasks associated with their military role. “Readiness” is a task-specific, short time-horizon performance forecast (e.g. less than 18 hour), potentially in combination with an absolute prediction of a physiological variable (e.g. VO2 max). These predictions must not be binary (ready/not ready), but rather scalar, and tailored to the task at hand.

Current approaches to assess readiness, while often context aware, are insufficient for providing useful outputs on operationally relevant timescales. Such approaches include medical checkups, physical readiness tests, and subjective self-assessment questionnaires - all of which are imprecise, time-consuming, and often fail to predict outcomes. Moreover, these evaluations are typically conducted periodically (on the order of months or years) further adding to the temporal misalignment of readiness outputs with mission preparation and/or execution.

Many of these existing practices to assess warfighter readiness have not evolved alongside advances in biotechnology, and efforts to improve the state-of-the-art face significant logistical challenges to widespread use. To develop objective assessments with predictive value, various research groups are exploring physiology-based biomarker predictors of readiness. However, the technologies currently used to analyze biological samples to determine predictive value either require analytical equipment in a laboratory with extensive processing times to obtain accurate results, or portable devices that are unable to analyze multiple classes of biomarkers simultaneously. While wearable technologies have appeal due to their widespread adoption in the consumer space and for enabling continuous, portable sensing, they are limited in the level of insight they can give into physiological processes for performance readiness assessments.

DARPA seeks proposals for development of a device that can quickly quantify, at point-of-person, the variety of molecular biomarkers necessary to predict task performance across a wide range of warfighter roles. The Smart Non-invasive Assays of Physiology (SNAP) program aims to develop a portable, fieldable, non-invasive device to assess warfighter physiological states, focusing on those associated with physical and cognitive readiness. Importantly, the device will leverage a combination of multi-omic, multiplexed biomarker detection, as well as integrated assessment and readout, to predict human performance in the context of real-world, DoD-relevant tasks. SNAP devices will be readily configurable to diverse DoD end user needs for readiness assessment and training, thereby providing an individualized view into warfighter performance state relative to that individual’s peak. As a result, this technological platform is anticipated to empower not only warfighters and associated decision makers, but also research groups across the DoD pursuing human performance and other physiology research.