 Hi, I'm Doug Tamello, Director of DEVCOM Soldier Center. Welcome and thank you for your interest and in support of Mastery's 72-Hour Field Study. I'd like to say a special thanks to the men and women of the 82nd Airborne Division Red Falcons who will participate in this study. I'd also like to thank our scientific partners across the services, industry, and academia for making this groundbreaking work possible. And of course lastly, I want to thank Dr. Erika Hussey and her incredible team from the Soldier Center for all the planning, hard work, and leadership that goes into planning and executing activity of this scope. I'm George Maytuk, the Program Manager for Measuring and Advancing Soldier Tactical Readiness and Effectiveness. Mastery is a collaborative, soldier-centric, science and technology effort that measures, predicts, and enhances soldier and squad close combat performance. Our collaborations include subject matter experts from across the services, industry, and academia. This work is done hand-in-hand with soldiers both in the lab and the field. The outcomes of our work will have broad implications across the Army in acquisition, training, and operations. In acquisition, we are closing the gap between our capabilities in the lab and the field and this allows us to devise modern and objective testing methodologies to assess individual and collective performance. For training, we will learn what, how, and when to measure those key human traits and states that affect close combat outcomes. This knowledge can be used to improve readiness as well as performance during field exercises, providing the right information to trainers and commanders to make data-driven decisions. In operations, the ability to monitor or predict performance has never before been possible. The implications for mission planning, command, and execution are dramatic, especially when it comes to commander's ability to employ their troop formations most effectively to achieve mission success. We will now turn our attention specifically to the 72-hour field study. A foundational aspect of our work is discovering the human performance X factors that reliably account for dismounted soldier and squad performance during sustained close combat operations. This is where we look to Dr. Hussey and the 72-hour field study team. The team will lead you through how we are pursuing such a fundamental aspect of soldier performance and the difference this will make for our soldiers. Hi, I'm Erica Hussey. I'm a cognitive scientist at DevCom Soldier Center and I'm the lead on the 72-hour field study work package. So the 72-hour field study is the Mastery Program's flagship effort that's aimed at understanding dismounted soldier performance. As part of that effort, we are taking a three-phase approach where we'd like to predict performance on the basis of a pre-mission phase, a mission phase, and a post-mission phase. The idea here is that the pre- and the post-mission phases flank a 72-hour field study or a 72-hour live training exercise during which we measure and monitor soldier performance. So we're specifically interested in quantifying performance to supplement the qualitative data that's typically collected in these types of training activities. So typically these training activities take a format where operator controllers will grade people using a go-no-go checklist. We're interested in developing ways in which we can passively and actively understand performance using quantifiable methodologies that can be repeatable over several training exercises. I've been working on the field study since 2017 when we first got a demand signal from General Carillo when he was the commander of the 82nd Airborne asking us to solve for the X-factors of soldier sustained performance. That led to a pilot study that we executed with paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne in 2018, which ultimately was the springboard for the mastery program. So moving forward, the 72-hour field study is the extension of that pilot in order to collect more data sets to feed models that require a significant amount of data, as well as to incorporate more modernized measures and metrics that we've learned about in the past three years. We're super excited about this and participate in the 72-hour field study. As we move forward, as technology advances, as leaders, it's about being able to focus our attention and with all of these data inputs, it's without some help from technology. You can be very, very quickly overwhelmed and not focused on the decisive point, the piece that you really need, where you add value as a leader. So I think the 72-hour field study is a way to get there where we can understand, like, all right, what don't I have to focus on right now? I actually kind of like the dashboard concept because it gives the leaders a good snapshot of what the outcomes are of their inputs, and it's one easy thing to read. And then additionally, like we had previously talked about, sometimes we think we're teaching stuff the right way, right, but then we actually learn it's, it, we as the army as the leader are going about it the wrong way, and from the scientific perspective, how can we better put that into a format so our junior soldiers can pick it up, retain it, and actually be able to move forward with that. And I think that's really important. That's kind of one of the things I'm hoping to get out of the leader development program portion of it. So much of leadership is intuitive and subjective, and we're really trying to add an objective piece to that to take care of our folks. So we're working with the folks up here trying to develop an algorithm that allows us to do that in order to, you know, our brilliant scientists up here can develop the algorithm, but in order to make that algorithm work, you know, they got to have some data to put in it, and we provide that data. Right now, as an army leader, you have to rely on experience and intuition in order to decide which soldier is ready for which mission. By backing it with scientific metrics, it helps us take some of that guesswork out, and while we're still able to, we're still relying on our intuition in order to make sure that we're putting our experience there, this gives us a scientific foundation to make those decisions. So to me, the data science part of this is the most interesting part. Again, I really like the objectivity it brings to the table and the fact that, I mean, the army is shifting a lot right now to using data to back up its decisions, and at the end of the day, it's data that should drive decisions. So I think the data we're collecting here is really powerful and has the opportunity to influence, you know, everything from what a squad leader does for PT, you know, how he plans his PT schedule based off of the fiscal readiness of his soldiers versus a division commander can look at, you know, the entire formation that he's in charge of and decide where he can push battalions in the case that the nation calls for the 82nd to drop somewhere. So we collect data from the soldiers using a variety of different types of scientifically vetted methodologies including cognitive tasks and psychological questionnaires, so gold standard measures of how people attend, how they think, how they remember information. We also utilize physical assessments to gather information about the soldier's strength, their gait, their balance, and we also utilize a series of wearable sensors, some are commercial grade, some are research grade, in order to understand activity, kinematics, sleep, physiology, and then finally, we utilize biosamples in the form of salivary samples and blood samples in order to assess biomarkers of chronic and acute stress. Mastery is collecting a large swath of data, everything from survey data on the computer to performance data to heart rate, for example, so sensor data. All that data needs to be combined in one place into a comprehensive database, which is what we're focusing on in Mastery to develop a human performance database that will allow us to analyze and develop and address specific questions for the Army. So Mastery, the program, we're trying to understand what makes soldiers, like high performers, the X factor. The information that we learn from our analysis, from the research program, we're hoping to deliver to useful tools to back to the division. So the guys from the 82nd, they're always training, they're always on the range, so we want to be able to, if that information that they're basically collecting internally to their units, if that information can be kind of aggregated and scored to help them better understand their readiness level and predict their performance, that's what we want to do. We want to help them understand how to make themselves better performers. Soldiers engaged in the 72-hour study are completing data in the field, so performance data, as well as survey data that's being collected on the computer. That data can contain demographic information, for example, military experience, sleep, eating habits, for example. All that data is being collected on the computer. Gathering all these metrics are important because it gives us that opportunity and the chance to really fine-tune us as an individual. Each individual has different things that drive them both externally, emotionally, family, and all those important things, but internally there's a lot of stuff going on that's different from soldier A and soldier B and soldier C. By really understanding what those differences are and how those metrics affect your performance allows you to really tailor what you eat, what you sleep, or how much you sleep, and what you do during the day in order to perform better at work. I think the end goal for leaders to have, and we've already begun working on it at the division level, is building kind of a commander's dashboard that displays their formation on a tablet and shows these metrics live from whatever wearables they're using or the army decides to use that'll show the readiness level on a scale of 1 to 100 of like, hey, this squad is the one that's most ready to go perform this mission based off the amount of rest they've had in the last 24 hours, based off of what they've been eating, based off of the amount of physical activity they've done. So ultimately it's something that a commander can easily look at and just have that quick snapshot of its formation showing the overall picture of the readiness level. The team has discussed our goals for the Mastery 70 to our field study, measuring and predicting close combat performance by partnering with soldiers. The data we collect in the dirt will help the scientists down select our predictive measures and feed the machine learning process used to generate models. One way these predictive models will ultimately be used is as a foundation to a commander's dashboard displaying the unit's readiness and predictive performance over the mission. This allows them to make better force allocation decisions, driving down risk and increasing the likelihood of mission success. Thank you for listening in. If you have any questions, please reach out through email so we can connect. We hope to see you at our DV event later this year where you'll have the opportunity to observe our data collection methods and tools in action and speak with the soldiers and scientists who have made this groundbreaking work possible for the Army.