Legionarius Smart Garments Report Wounds Using goTenna Pro X Series + ATAK
Challenge
In June of 2024, goTenna and Legionarius embarked on a mission to showcase the impact of remote situational awareness and intervention in treating hemorrhaging wounds from gunshots, shrapnel, or explosives. Legionarius’ Smart Garments leveraged goTenna’s off-grid network data transport layer for this battlefield simulation test. The successful pairing of Legionarius Smart Garments with a goTenna Pro X2 device could revolutionize battlefield medical intervention. It would enable instant transmission of crucial wound and health data, ensure immediate support from teammates, and significantly enhance mission success and safety. This breakthrough could optimize medical responses and resources, eliminating the need for costly satellite communications or easily detectable radio voice transmissions.
The challenge faced on the battlefield is intervention during the “platinum five minutes,” which is critical to increasing survival rates. To increase battlefield intervention, medical personnel must know who is injured, what type of wound, and where and when the injury occurs on the battlefield.
Supporting evidence includes:
- 91% of potentially survivable battlefield deaths are caused by bleeding
- It takes less than three minutes before a massive hemorrhage becomes fatal
- It can be less than one minute before loss of consciousness can occur
- Medics have incomplete data to decide whom to treat and in which order
- Continuity of care is challenged by unreliable or missing data on treatments initiated (passed on verbally between crews)
The only way to identify if a warfighter is injured is through traditional verbal communication methods or input via typing into information systems. Both efforts require human-in-the-loop actions. The Legionarius Smart Garment will provide immediate situational awareness to medical personnel to help treat wounds during the “platinum five minutes.”
Solution
Before deploying goTenna end users and test dummies into the field, goTenna’s team ensured that each phone paired with a goTenna device could log into the goTenna Pro + ATAK plugin. Most of the participants had goTenna Pro X2 paired to their Galaxy S20 with all phones set to “Airplane” mode. Throughout the series of tests, a total of eight goTenna devices were deployed into the field as part of three rigorous tests, with the first two experiments set in an outdoor shooting range:
1. A Legionarius Smart Garment was placed on a dummy which endured an improvised explosive device explosion (shrapnel), sending data back over the goTenna network to a staged base of operations inside of a warehouse.
2. This same dummy was then dressed in a new Legionarius Smart Garment, enduring a series of rifle and pistol shots.
Pictured above: Legionarius Smart Garment positioned on a movable dummy during the IED test and the artillery test.
The final test took place indoors during a CQB and TCCC event. A series of end users were dressed in new Legionarius Smart Garments to see if the wounds could still be detected through the inside of a building and transmit wound information, vital signs and text messages., especially after a booby trapped door “injured” the breacher during the CQB exercise, transitioning to a care-under-fire and extraction operation.
Pictured above: Experts from Valletta Industries gear up with Legionarius’ Smart Shirts and goTenna Pro X2s for CQB (Close Quarter Combat) and TCCC (Tactical Combat Casualty Care) tests.
Results
These series of tests proved that end users can send back critical medical data entirely hands-free in environments where voice communications, satellite, or cell service connectivity does not exist. With every garment test, goTenna was able to transmit the exact location of each test wound (one displaying two “through-shots” with a rifle, and the other displaying full-frontal damage from an improvised explosive device). Additional Legionarius features included notification of blast damage, vital information, medevac requests, and “needs help” messages in a series of tests throughout the exercise. The plugin also allowed operators to see the location of team members, as well as the location and timestamp of where the garment wearer or dummy received the penetrating wound.
“This exercise shows how Legionarius and goTenna can transform health monitoring by allowing users to instantly send vital data to their teammates or to their chain of command, fostering prompt responses that can mean the difference between life and death.”
Dr. Alexander Gruentzig
Co-Founder of Legionarius
goTenna partnered with Legionarius under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I and Phase II contracts to develop goTenna's integration with Legionarius' wound detection garments.