B ecause stress is a leading cause of illness and disease and is so pervasive, there is an inherent need to be able to monitor stress in real time over extended periods. A real-time personal stress monitor would benefit individuals by providing continuous feedback about their stress levels and by helping their physicians to objectively evaluate stress exposure between visits. We are developing personal health monitors based on a wireless body area network (BAN) of intelligent sensors [1]. Individual monitors will be integrated into a distributed wireless system for synchronized monitoring of a group of subjects. This system could be used during the selection process and as part of a psychophysiological evaluation of military members undergoing intense training. We use measures of heart-rate variability (HRV) to quantify stress level prior to and during training as well as to predict stress resistance. This task requires reliable, high-precision instrumentation and synchronized measurements from a group of individuals over prolonged periods (days of training). Our preliminary results indicate that individuals who have better stress tolerance also exhibit significantly different patterns of HRV, both before and during stress exposure. These baseline differences in HRV are predictive of actual military and cognitive neuropsychological test performance scores assessed during and after stress exposure [1], [2]. During our preliminary investigations, we used a stressful component of aviation water survival training, the 9D5 Multi-place Underwater Egress Trainer, as our event for the whole group. The 9D5 is a reasonably realistic representation of a helicopter conducting an emergency landing, turning upside down, and sinking. Trainees report the 9D5 session as the most stressful training event during water survival training.

No abstract