 Thank you, Ashkan, and hello, Portland. I can't even begin to express how great it is to be here today amongst these incredible minds currently working in float, but I must give you a full disclosure. I myself am relatively new to float. I've been working in recovery research for the last five years, but I'm very excited to be bringing floatation research to Ohio State University. Today, I want to take this opportunity to explain a little bit about how we got here, why we're interested in float research, a few of our preliminary findings, but most importantly, where we're headed in the next year. So our research at Ohio State is in collaboration with the Strong Lab and the 7-Eleven Human Performance Wing of Air Force Research Laboratory, but our mission really transcends any military branch because our focus is to improve the performance and help sustain both the health and safety of the military special operator. Special ops, not for the faint of heart. I want to thank anyone in the audience who has given service to this country. Most of us do not come close to either the mental or physical profile needed to be successful in this environment. A special operator is the peak of strength in fitness. They've been optimally trained and hand selected for their role. Their low anxiety, clearly I'm out. They rely on their training, yet they are aggressive in the face of imminent danger. A top performer, yet a team player. The work of the operator involves intense physical exertion, heavy load carriage, extreme environments, both in temperature and terrain, prolonged missions, sleep deprivation, caloric deficits. Yet, despite these harsh conditions, the operator is expected to remain mentally clear so that they can make complex decisions at a moment's notice. Decisions that can have fatal consequences. Cumulatively, the stress on the body is unimaginable. Now, we know acutely, stress, that stress response, gives us the edge we need to perform, right? We can all think of those compensations, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, changes in energy availability, things that are adaptive to performing here and now in a stressful environment. Whether that may be because we're running late for a meeting or because you're about to parachute out of a helicopter, cross enemy lines, and engage in a hostage rescue situation. The stress response is a negative feedback. So when I remove the stress or the stressful event is over, we see the stress response diminish as well as the associated compensations. But in a military environment as intense as the one as I just described, the cumulative assault on the body can lead to chronic stress. Chronic elevations and cortisol, changes in cardiovascular metrics, changes in immune function. Chronic stress is associated with decreased performance, both mental and physical, as well as increased risk of both injury and illness. Now, given that small subset, that small pool of eligible individuals for this job, the expense of training, we have to find ways to sustain the lifespan of the military operator. We have to find ways to combat the stress response, to increase resilience, to make sure that our operator is healthy and ready to perform. Enter human performance monitoring. This is our first kind of mission in targeting the stress response. The Air Force is working to create a comprehensive monitoring platform that can assess biometrics noninvasively and also in real time so that I don't have to wait on a blood draw sent to a lab where I get results four, five days later. Instead, I can pull out an iPad and I can look remotely at how my team is doing, at least physically. The idea is to combine the best technologies out there, all these commercial products, to create what we refer to as the dashboard of the human weapon system, so that in a single snapshot, I can get an idea, engage an individual's readiness for the mission. Now, this is a combination of how well you slept last night, what's your energy balance, biomarkers from the sweat of stress, fatigue, hydration, and technologies will continue to change and will change our markers and our sensor sets so that we can most accurately portray the human system. But collecting data is not enough. Data is meaningless without understanding and knowledge. I think in this age of technology, we often fall into this mind of thinking the more data, the better. But I have to understand what are the best predictors of performance. I have to understand, what does it look like when I'm at my peak? What does it look like when I'm out of balance? And how does being out of balance affect my performance? This is where our super users come in. We're incredibly humbled to not only work with the best of the best in the military, but to also collaborate with some incredible sports teams, both professionally and at the collegiate level. The athlete is much more accessible than the special operator. And we can collect a massive amount of data when we're looking at teams. But remember, data is not everything. Athletics also provides us with a paradigm to understand how physiology is affecting performance readiness. Because in athletics, they're defined performance metrics, wins, losses, PRs in the gym, PRs on the field. I can begin to look at my physiology, my biometrics, how are they related to how I perform? Our super users are our test bed for this human monitoring system, not only in the fact that we're collecting all this data to devise algorithms to figure out what is a good predictor, but they also test our technology, help us understand what's gonna stand up, what is steelproof in athletics, as well as in the military. I may see, okay, yep, you're out of balance, you're in the red. But I can't change the stress. I can't walk into a professional sports football practice and say, you know, coach, I think you need to sit your quarterback today. I've been watching him over the last three or four days and he's looking really stressed. I don't think it's in your best interest to put him on the field. That's not gonna happen. But what I can do is help make sure that that athlete is able to tackle the stress and able to recover from the stress of their job so that they're able to perform. Recovery is our number one tool in moving an individual out of the red, back into the green and being ready to perform. But I have to understand in prescribing recovery, what am I recovering from? What aspect of my physiology is being compromised and keeping me from performing to my best? So up there you see all kinds of recovery interventions, meditation, massage, float. But there's no magic bullet. We have to understand what are the merits and the limitations of each of these recovery interventions. We are first introduced to float about three years ago in our collaboration with the Navy. They were using float with their teams and the feedback we got was great. The guys loved it. They were in and out of the tanks all day. They said it really helped them feel calm. They felt their mental stress reduced in addition to their physical. That it helped with some pains and aches that they may have been feeling from training. So knowing next to nothing about float ourselves, we went right to the literature. What does science say? What has science shown that float is able to do? You know what we found. We found changes in mood, changes in anxiety, changes in pain, tension. What we were most encouraged by was the fact that float may be able to target multiple physiologic systems simultaneously. This has incredible implications for total body recovery. The salt, the reduced gravitational stresses for improvement of the musculoskeletal system, reduced inputs to the brain, control of that stress response, decreases in cortisol, which we know have implications for immune function, for metabolism. But another thing that we were so encouraged by were reports that you didn't need a lot of practice, that it didn't take much instruction that the novice client could see benefits from float. All right, this sounded too good to be true, so we're like, we gotta get one of these ourselves. We were able to put one in at the Air Force Base at Wright Pat. We were also able to put two into our super user populations and athletics at both the University of Cincinnati and Ohio State. And this was our first look. Is there any benefit to float in our context, how we would wanna use it? And are the athletes gonna like it? It can be the best product out there, but if the athlete doesn't like it, they aren't gonna use it, we gotta start over. We have to find something that they're going to use. So I'm gonna be brief here because Bob Manjean from the University of Cincinnati is up next and he's really gonna be able to describe for you what's happening with the athlete, the things that he's found over the last few months. But I do wanna give you just a little teaser into some of the things we found. One of the biometrics that we study is a morning heart rate variability measurement so that we can get an idea of how the autonomic nervous system is for an athlete when they wake up, how ready they are for their day. And we know that this variable is going to kind of change and fluctuate based on the training, based on the stress. And so we're not as worried about what this looks like at one particular moment in time, but instead how an athlete is trending over maybe two, three, four days. Once we see an imbalance for a few days, that's when we may recommend some sort of intervention. So for an athlete that is trending highly sympathetic, we need to kind of calm the system. So we may recommend things like light massage, active recovery in the form of walking, cycling. For an individual that's highly parasympathetic, we need to do the opposite. We need to kind of provide a shock to the nervous system. So we may recommend heat ice contrast, high intensity sprints as part of their warm-up. Now looking at heart rate variability surrounding float, we found that individuals who went in highly sympathetic came out with a reduced sympathetic activity and significantly increased parasympathetic activity. Now, this is kind of the expectation, right? Float is relaxing, float is calming. That's really no surprise. What we found, though, when we put in an individual who was highly parasympathetic, the opposite, we actually saw reduced parasympathetic activity and increases trending towards significant in sympathetic activity. And for those individuals that went in in balance, that calming effect, significant increases in vagal tone and parasympathetic activity. In a smaller subset, oh, so I should say here, the great potential is that it works in both directions. In a smaller subset of individuals, we also looked at circulating cortisol. And we saw benefits here at the level of adrenal stress that float could target the brain. That at the level of the hypothalamus of the anterior pituitary, we're reducing the hormonal signals so that we have less glucocorticoids in the bloodstream. We have less effect of this stress with implications for immune function, with implications for metabolism. That cortisol is affecting every avenue of your body. So these are great, but it's anecdotal evidence. This is an athletic population. This is where we wanna use it. But there isn't a lot of inherent control here. So, very excited to say that this past May, we received funding to start our first laboratory-controlled rest study at Ohio State in the Kramer Laboratory in the Department of Human Sciences. We began construction of our float room earlier this summer so that we'd have our own for research, not just the pod over in athletics. And just this week, we finished construction. How to throw in an extra slide, because that's how excited we are. We're in our kind of final stages of the IRB process. For all of you who are involved in research, you know this can be a bit of a headache. But we're hoping, if all goes as planned, to be enrolling subjects in our first research study by the end of this semester or early into next year. This float room is just a great compliment to the state-of-the-art facilities that already exist within the Human Sciences Department at Ohio State. It's going to allow us to really get a systematic profile of how acute flotation therapy can affect recovery from physical stress. In the lab, we often use exercise to induce a controlled stress response. So, in this scenario, we're gonna use an intense anaerobic protocol. For those of you that are into resistance training, we're gonna do intense high squats. We're gonna do six by 10 at 80% max and follow that up with some intense sprinting. So, this is for sure going to cause pain, soreness, alteration and hormone profiles. Anyone wanna participate? Sounds fun, right? A little more about this study. We're gonna bring in healthy males between the ages of 18 and 35 to kinda simulate that special operator population. They're gonna come into the lab for a total of nine visits each. It's kinda devised into three separate blocks, familiarization, as well as two testing blocks. During familiarization, we wanna introduce our subjects to float. We wanna make sure that they're comfortable with the testing protocols so that they're able to give us their best when it comes to testing. For the testing blocks, they're identical with the exception of recovery. In one, subjects will get a one-hour float after that intense exercise. And in the other, they're gonna get a one-hour seated passive control so that we can compare these two and begin to understand is float, does it accelerate recovery in any way? What systems is it tackling? Now this is a within subjects design. So each subject is going to complete both testing blocks and the order will be randomized to control for kind of order effects. So a deeper look at each testing session. In red there are kind of the time points that we're gonna be collecting measurements. So we'll bring an individual in. They'll have reframed from exercise for the last 72 hours. We'll be controlling and monitoring what they've eaten. They're actually gonna come into the lab in the morning fasted because we're looking at blood draws. We'll do those pre-exercise measures and then we'll throw them through that assault on their body, that anaerobic exercise protocol. Immediately after exercise, we'll get some more measures and then we'll send them in to either the float or the seated rest condition. We'll get measures again right after they get out of the float but then we're gonna bring them back 24 and 48 hours later so we can see kind of in a more extended version to look at recovery because recovery doesn't happen immediately. You know the paradigm for recovery is over a couple of days. What we're gonna be looking at. A whole slew of biomarkers for system stress and recovery. We're gonna look at the nervous system. We're gonna look at use EEG to look at cortical brain activity, galvanic skin response, heart rate variability, catecholamines. We're gonna look at inflammation in the blood. We're gonna look at IL-6, TNF-alpha, C-reactive protein. We're gonna look for endocrine profiles so we can understand that HPA access from the hypothalamus to the pituitary to the adrenal gland where that cortisol is coming from. We're gonna look at markers of muscle damage, myoglobin for that acute effect right after exercise, right after float, creating kinase to look at recovery at that 24 and 48 hour mark. We're gonna look at performance metrics, both physical to see recovery of the musculoskeletal system, as well as cognitive functions. We wanna look at executive function, attention, reaction time. In addition to this, we're gonna look at perceptual information. We're gonna look at their mood state, their fatigue, how well they slept. We're trying to kind of create this broad umbrella of systematic behavior so we can understand just how float fits in. How can I best use float to recover my athlete? Under what context, under what situation, can I take an athlete, put him in a float, get him out of that red, and get him into the green? How can I get them to their peak performance? So this is just the very start and we look forward to coming back and sharing with you what we found in the next year or two. But in closing, I really just wanna say thank you. Thank you to our research collaborators in the military, as well as our athletic partners. Without their help, this applied and laboratory controlled research wouldn't be happening in Ohio. So thank you all for listening. And like I said, look forward to coming back in sharing our results.