By Leslie Saxon, M.D. Executive Director, USC Center for Body Computing; Professor of Medicine, Clinical Scholar, Keck School of Medicine of USC
The USC Center for Body Computing is a 17-year-old health and human performance lab dedicated to exploring holistic solutions using digital tools for elite performers, patients, and anyone who’s a human. We have a large military research portfolio, and have received a total of $12 million in DOD-funded research over the last eight years. This research has been focused on personalized health – continuous measures of an individual servicemember and delivery of that information in a closed loop system back to them.
In light of this, our overall goals are to provide a new model of human performance in healthcare that we term life care that integrates measures of physiology, psychology, and socialization. Through this, we provide a more holistic measure of a human, more continuously, and with higher fidelity, than ever before. Through this research we can make the breakthroughs that are needed in the next hundred years of healthcare.
The Lightning Platform
Our research relies heavily on a cyber-secure platform that we’ve custom built for the Department of Defense (DoD) that can plug-and-play with a variety of different medical-grade sensors. Our ethics and our goals are to use medical-grade sensors whenever possible because these sensors tend to be more accurate, more vetted for efficacy and safety.
Through the Lightning Platform, the experience that we’re providing to an individual allows them to collect, in real-time, a continuous personalized health record that far exceeds anything like an electronic medical record because it reflects their continuous health.
Everyone’s health and human performance is different. Medical definitions of health or disease are very limited, and that there’s a lot of functional fluidity between health and disease states. These generalizations and categories that we put people in are limited by the fact that we’ve been seeing people episodically and have not had access to continuous data.
So the DoD funding that I’ve referenced has supported this multi-year effort that has enrolled over 600 active duty service members across four bases and six different military groups.
Let me describe the experience of what it’s like to be in one of our studies:
Onboarding
Firstly, you go onto our research app, to “onboard” and give your consent, then tell us a little bit about yourself within the app.
Through this we allow people to, in a really granular way, understand who they are, and in a way that they haven’t before. Then, in a more accelerated way, affect behavior change to influence their health.
Validated Cognitive Assessments
In the military, fatigue degrades human performance. Sleep is essential. But many are not sleeping adequately, and our research is able to show them how their validated cognitive assessment is affected as a result.
Brain health is one of the major interests of the military right now. Not just because of the global war on terror, and the 20 years of war after that, which affected many people’s brain health acutely and chronically, but also because brain health is very much influenced by sleep.
So when we ask a person how they’re feeling and they say “fine” but then they do a measure of their executive function or cognitive function and they see that they’re not on track. That’s a real-time indicator that the way you feel, and the way you perceive you are, these are two different things.
Why is that important? Because that will accelerate insights and behavior change.
So one of the great innovations of this platform is that we put these medical-grade measures of your cognition or your physiology or your sleep right next to each other for you to see every day and you can see your trends.
And we’ve gamified it.
You can compete with your peers on those measures or at least compare yourself.
So this is a soldier-facing, closed-loop health management system for both chronic disease or human performance that allows you to modify, in a private way, your own health and human performance and then gain unprecedented insights into your own cognitive status, physiologic status, mood, psychological status, and stress.
PTSD & Recovery
Let’s say that you’re 22 years old, and you’re in a Marine battalion, and we’re trying to understand how to cultivate your military propensity over time so you’ll thrive in the military. You’ll also be safer and avoid conditions like PTSD.
PTSD affects more people not exposed to combat than it affects people exposed to combat, because a lesser percentage of our forces are exposed to combat these days.
If I tell you, a 22-year-old male, for instance, that your history of childhood violence, the fact that you may have gotten beaten as a child, increases your risk of PTSD or of not thriving in the military, how likely are you to integrate that and understand that?
So we give things like videos, not just on how to use our technology, but why that history of childhood violence could ultimately cause you to be more susceptible to a psychological injury in the military.
And I think those types of accelerated insights that people can integrate and understand will allow them to start to perform the psychological mitigations that are necessary to lessen that risk.
Formats & AI
For a long time we played around with delivering information through our video in a closed way. And found people don’t open PDFs and do things like that anymore.
But using an Instagram-like custom-built video library to address psychological status, as I’ve just talked about, pre-exposes people to certain training scenarios or information about how to eat or their metabolism. That’s much more effective.
Human Performance
So whatever we’re measuring: your metabolism, your sleep, your psychology, or your social history, we can then, at the appropriate time, depending on what your values are showing us, we can educate you in the moment about what that means. Then, what the best immediate action is, and the optimum future actions are, to preserve your health and your performance.
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