Blueforce Plugin Series: CBRNE and HAZMAT Response

The complex environment of warfare and mass casualty incidents produces multiple environmental hazards that can harm personnel and prevent the accomplishment of military and public safety objectives. The renewed use of chemical weapons in Syria, contaminated water in military on continental United States (CONUS) bases, and a deadly fourth generation agent (FGA) employment in United Kingdom illustrate the continuing evolution of methods and hazards.

The lack of interoperability and integration of existing sensors and information systems containing data on potential Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) exposures and other environmental health hazards creates an unprecedented risk to sustaining combat strength on the battlefield, and responder health at the incident site. Integration of real-time environmental exposure monitoring and health hazard assessment is critical for risk mitigation and mission success. Network and fused information incorporating data critical from near real-time sensors and applications is critical to displaying the risk picture created by CBRN agents, Toxic Industrial Chemicals (TIC), Toxic Industrial Materials (TIM), and other environmental hazards for tactical and operational decision-makers. This picture enables synchronization at tactical, operational and strategic levels for health risk assessment, contamination avoidance, decontamination, and definitive medical treatment. Integrated collection enables archiving to improve future risk assessments, development of new medical and non-medical countermeasures and the archiving of data in military health systems for longitudinal health records to ensure affected service members long term care.

Currently implemented joint CBRN capabilities and Military Health Systems (MHS) capabilities struggle to produce integrated actionable information from the wealth of data that are collected or that can be collected from the myriad sensors in the field. Often, CBRN hazard information and environmental hazard information collected from CBRN units and medical units travel in different systems and reporting chains. These processes often intersect in policy management, at combatant commands, the services, and at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, often too late to mitigate operational and tactical risk. Consequently, many environmental exposures are not tracked, or their significance cannot be discovered from single sources of data, and so they are not considered in tactical and operational decisions. Additionally, they are not quickly captured in health records, complicating long term health care and rehabilitation. Lack of collection, exploitation, and awareness of exposures and hazards results in preventable illness, delay of maneuver for uncharacterized environmental hazards, redeployment of personnel, and burdensome congressional investigations of suspected environmental exposures. This capability gap has recently manifested with renewed legislative interest involving Gulf War Illness and burn pit exposures. Blueforce offers a new approach to data fusion with an emphasis on autonomy and the application of emerging technology in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

A multidimensional challenge to achieve cross-domain data fusion stems from failures of data collection and processing that causes and maintains gaps among CBRN sensors, environmental exposure monitoring, health hazard assessment, and risk mitigation capabilities. Blueforce is an IoT data fusion software platform for forward sensor fusion with edge-based processing that accelerates recognitional decision-making that it is “always on” when needed, and fully integrates exposure and health effects monitoring for a broad range of Blueforce Plugins which can detect and monitor adverse exposures to include CBRN, TICs, TIMs, naturally occurring disease, and environmental hazards such as noise, heat, and blast. What follows is a listing of HAZMAT and CBRN purpose built plugins, all deployed/TRL9 and “off-the-shelf” ready.

For more information or to request a demo, visit us at https://www.blueforcedev.com, or send an email to info@blueforcedev.com.