Day 2 Welcomes & Opening Remarks
The global pandemic has exposed serious flaws in supply chains, including critical ones for industries such as pharma and medical supplies. Shortages of personal protective equipment for health workers and ventilators in hospitals are the most prominent ones. To prevent this problem from occurring again when the next disaster strikes, governments should consider establishing a stress test for companies that provide critical goods and services that’s akin to the stress tests for banks that the U.S. government and European Union instituted after the 2008 financial crisis. This test should focus on the resilience of companies’ supply chains.
With the proliferation of commercial wearable devices, we are now able to obtain unprecedented insight into the ever-changing physical state of our bodies. These devices allow real-time monitoring of biosignals that can generate actionable information to enable optimized interventions to avoid injury and enhance performance. Combat and medical planners across all military services are keenly interested in harnessing wearable sensor advances to diagnose, predict, and improve warfighter health and performance. However, moving from civilian promise to military reality is complex, with unique requirements of hardware design, real-time networking, data management, cybersecurity, predictive model building, and decision science. Emerging technologies for military on-the-move monitoring will be highlighted, along with a discussion of an integrated open systems architecture approach for functional evolution.
Eugene Fitzgerald Professor of Materials Science & Engineering
Jeffrey Grossman Professor of Materials Science & Engineering