Wearable devices monitor sailors’ sleep during sea exercises

Summary: The Naval Health Research Center (NHRC) is conducting a study during RIMPAC 2024 to monitor sleep and fatigue among sailors aboard the USS Curtis Wilbur. About 200 sailors will wear rings and watches that collect biometric data, focusing primarily on sleep. The data will be processed through the Optimized Watchbill Logistics system to help predict and mitigate fatigue risks. The study is part of the NHRC’s Command Readiness, Endurance, and Watchstanding program in partnership with MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which aims to improve human performance and fatigue management in the Navy.

Key conclusions

Wearable Technology: About 200 sailors aboard the USS Curtis Wilbur will wear rings and watches that will track their total sleep time and other biometrics to help identify those at high risk for fatigue.
Data integration and processing: The collected data will be securely and automatically transferred to the OWL system, which improves operational planning and scheduling of vessel activities, enabling real-time monitoring and mitigation of operational fatigue risks.
Fatigue management: This study is part of the larger NHRC CREW program, which aims to optimize human performance and fatigue management in surface forces through continuous improvement and realistic testing conditions during intensive maritime operations.

Scientists from the Naval Health Research Center (NHRC) Operational Readiness Division studying sleep and fatigue in sailors and Marines outfitted the guided-missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur (DDG 54) and her crew with equipment to participate in an at-sea study.

About 200 sailors on board the ship will wear devices (rings and watches) to monitor biometric data, primarily total sleep time. Data from the wearables can be used to identify individual sailors at high risk of fatigue and predict fatigue risk across the entire shipboard department.

Trident Warrior, the Rim of the Pacific Experimental Sector (RIMPAC), is scheduled to take place from June 27 to August 1 in and around Hawaii. RIMPAC is a two-year, large-scale, international naval exercise involving 29 nations and more than 25,000 personnel.

NHRC CREW Program

The sea trial is part of the broader NHRC-led CREW (Command Readiness, Endurance and Watch) program, which was established to optimize human performance and fatigue management in surface forces.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, a technical partner in the NHRC CREW program, has adapted data flows and processing from commercial, off-the-shelf wearable devices to securely and automatically transmit sleep and other readiness data to a watch list management program called Optimized Watchbill Logistics (OWL). Sleep data from wearable devices is collected as personnel pass through data centers located in common spaces on the ship, such as mess areas, and processed into an OWL-ready format.

The OWL tool streamlines operational planning workflows and vessel activity scheduling and enables real-time monitoring to detect and mitigate operational fatigue risks. CREW and OWL work together as a comprehensive fatigue risk monitoring and management solution.

Development and Goals of the CREW System

“The system is in a development cycle that includes iterative testing and refinement that (each time) brings us closer to the intended end state of this system: an offline, passive, intuitive, wearable device system that blends into the ship’s background without requiring extensive manual intervention by research personnel or the ship’s crew,” Rachel Markwald, sleep specialist and principal investigator for the CREW program at the Naval Health Research Center, said in a press release.

The purpose of RIMPAC Trident Warrior 24 is to demonstrate the ability to monitor fatigue risk on demand using the latest CREW System version 2.0.

“Being aboard the Curtis Wilbur for RIMPAC, when the ships are operating at high speeds, allows our research to be as realistic as possible,” Navy Lt. Matthew Peterson, NHRC research physiologist, said in a news release. “Every time we go out to demonstrate the latest system, we learn how we can best implement this technology in the dynamic shipboard environment.”