Pentagon wants to spot illnesses by monitoring soldiers’ smartphones
Pentagon wants to spot illnesses by monitoring soldiers’
smartphones
The U.S. military hopes to have an app someday that can
detect illness in service members.
By Aaron Gregg April 15 at 9:00 AM
Imagine that your smartphone’s camera, microphone and
motion sensors were monitoring you for signs of illness. That’s the future
envisioned by scientists at the Pentagon’s secretive weapons development arm,
where such a system is being built to keep tabs on deployed U.S. service
members.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced
Thursday that it has awarded a $5.1 million contract to the Fairfax, Va.-based
cybersecurity company Kryptowire to develop what DARPA calls the “Warfighter
Analytics using Smartphones for Health” program, or WASH for short. The app
would be used to spot diseases based on data that it collects from a person’s
smartphone.
Tom Karygiannis, Kryptowire’s vice president of product,
said he hopes the technology can one day broaden access to health care by
spotting health problems before a person visits a doctor or nurse. “Ultimately,
this could mean better treatment, cost savings and making treatment available
to more people,” he said.
But the idea has privacy advocates spooked.
“If you’re activating a microphone on someone’s phone,
that is going to raise a lot of alarms,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy
analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union. “People don’t want to feel
like someone is listening in on their private life. That’s going to have to be
subject to tight controls.”
For DARPA, the goal is to help the military deal with
some of its biggest health-care problems while conserving resources. The WASH
development program started last year and will continue through 2021, an agency
spokesman said.
“The program aims to develop algorithms that use raw data
from smartphone sensors to enable continuous and real-time assessment” of
warfighters’ health status, identifying latent or developing conditions and
diseases, DARPA communications chief Jared Adams said in an email.
According to a fact sheet published by the agency, the
app will collect data from smartphone features including cameras, light
sensors, pedometers, fingerprint sensors, microphones and other sources. With the
knowledge and consent of the user, the information would be collected
continuously and passively, meaning a soldier’s smartphone could be constantly
scanning for signs that something is wrong.
Company officials say one goal of the research is to find
a way to keep that data secure and private — safe from hackers or inadvertent
leaks.
The work evolved out of an earlier project at Kryptowire
to replace password sign-ons with passive electronic monitoring.
Kryptowire’s primary business is a software tool that
searches for vulnerabilities in mobile applications. The company works under
contract with the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and a
grab bag of private corporations.
That work led to a technology designed to let people sign
into their smartphones by identifying all the ways they interact with the
device: How people walk, how they hold the phone and how often they use it all
became a part of the “profile” that could detect whether the person using a
phone is its true owner.
After learning how to build these profiles, product
developers at Kryptowire realized they might also be able to detect when
something is wrong.
“For example, if a user is inebriated we found they would
interact with the device differently,” Karygiannis said. “So if you can do
that, the question is, what else can you do?”
Now, with financial backing from DARPA, the company is
reaching out to hospitals and medical research institutions to figure out how
to use that information to detect illnesses.
Possible targets could include early detection of
diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s or conditions such as
post-traumatic stress disorder, company officials said.
Once the company’s medical research partners understand
what the technology can do, Karygiannis said, “they’ll probably come up with
other ideas that we haven’t.”
Executives at Kryptowire say the eventual goal is to move
beyond the military to everyday smartphone users, though they acknowledge that
the technology would need to make a big leap from the current fitness and other
health apps on the market.
Still, there’s some precedent for what Kryptowire and
DARPA are doing. Companies are pushing commercial smartphone apps that
diabetics can use to track their blood sugar levels. Fitness apps such as
Fitbit have become so popular that some employers are building rewards programs
around them, paying their workers small bonuses for healthy behavior, for
example.
Seeing DARPA put money down on such an untested idea
suggests that private investors might take an interest in it, too. After all,
there is a long history of DARPA-funded technologies eventually entering the
civilian world; GPS and the Internet (once called ARPAnet, after the agency’s
predecessor) benefited from early funding from the agency.
Chris Shipley, managing partner of Ascent Line Partners,
an innovation and market strategy consultancy, said the agency’s involvement
could mean the technology will hit the commercial market much sooner than it
otherwise would have.
“I think these are really early days,” Shipley said.
“The fact that this is being deployed in a DARPA-funded
application is going to be a great learning space for how they can be used in a
consumer context.”
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