Hephaestus
AFWERX · AFWERX TACFI · AFWERX
Award
Description
This effort – the Hephaestus TACFI as a sequential Phase II in support of the WarTAK—CAAGE effort – has two goals: 1. To properly scope the integration and procurement tasks for a successful Phase III effort; 2. To increase the utility of our offering by exposing GSC to our ability to measure cognitive fatigue (sleep, mental state, inebriation, etc.) to increase their risk management through scheduling and selection. Our first arm of this effort aligns with the standard use of TACFI. Hephaestus will be used as the staging ground for a well-scoped and understood Phase III effort that will complete the imbedding of our technology within the MSOS units of GSC. This ongoing effort provides gesture control to these security forces as a new means of controlling TAK that eliminates heads-down time, increases situational awareness. This capability has been supported across multiple contracts with GSC and is reaching a point of readiness to integrate and procure. This will be conducted through the following Planning Objectives (POs):Engage with the WarTAK Program of Record Office to understand all expectations for integration with their present use of TAK.Engage with ATO specialists (both government and consultants) to understand all expectations for securing permissions to operationalize our technologies.Work with A3 and A5/8 to develop a POMing and Funding Plan, as well as agree on a Phase III plan of action.The second objective of the proposed Hephaestus TACFI is to validate and improve the performance of Pison’s present prototype readiness model based on trained data related to the measure of readiness through PVT. This prototype passive readiness model uses data collected from Pison’s Ready wrist wearable device – presently undergoing user testing within the 341st Special Security Forces community for gesture control and haptic feedback use cases – and accompanying machine learning algorithms to provide an objective measure of an airman’s level of readiness and fatigue as related to mental acuity. Additionally, we will seek to generate a readiness dashboard within the TAK environment (ATAK within this effort and integration with WaRTAK in the future) to facilitate the monitoring of unit and individual readiness by the convoy commander. The specific Phase II Technical Objectives (TOs) to achieve our objective will include the following:Enhance and increase specificity of Pison’s Passive PVT Mental Acuity model to meet the needs of the GSC Convoy Security Forces.Develop a Readiness Dashboard capable of accepting and integrating the measurements of all Pison devices within a unit as an at-a-glance aid for the convoy commanders.Validate the performance of the prototype Readiness machine learning model under operationally and contextually relevant conditions, to demonstrate Hephaestus achieves the key results detailed within the Technical Volume.