7 février 2019 | International, Sécurité, Autre défense

DARPA: Intelligent Healing for Complex Wounds

Blast injuries, burns, and other wounds experienced by warfighters often catastrophically damage their bones, skin, and nerves, resulting in months to years of recovery for the most severe injuries and often returning imperfect results. This long and limited healing process means prolonged pain and hardship for the patient, and a drop in readiness for the military. However, DARPA believes that recent advances in biosensors, actuators, and artificial intelligence could be extended and integrated to dramatically improve tissue regeneration. To achieve this, the new Bioelectronics for Tissue Regeneration (BETR) program asks researchers to develop bioelectronics that closely track the progress of the wound and then stimulate healing processes in real time to optimize tissue repair and regeneration.

Paul Sheehan, the BETR program manager, described his vision for the technology as “not just personalized medicine, but dynamic, adaptive, and precise human therapies” that adjust to the wound state moment by moment to provide greater resilience to wounded warfighters.

“Wounds are living environments and the conditions change quickly as cells and tissues communicate and attempt to repair,” Sheehan said. “An ideal treatment would sense, process, and respond to these changes in the wound state and intervene to correct and speed recovery. For example, we anticipate interventions that modulate immune response, recruit necessary cell types to the wound, or direct how stem cells differentiate to expedite healing.”

The envisioned BETR technology would represent a sharp break from traditional wound treatments, and even from other emerging technologies to facilitate recovery, most of which are passive in nature.

Under current medical practice, physicians provide the conditions and time for the body to either heal itself when tissues have regenerative capacity or to accept and heal around direct transplants. Most people are familiar with interventions that include casts to stabilize broken bones or transplants of healthy ligaments or organs from donors to replace tissues that do not regenerate.

Passive approaches often result in slow healing, incomplete healing with scarring, or, in some unfortunate cases, no healing at all. Blast injuries in particular seem to scramble the healing processes; 23 percent of them will not fully close. Moreover, research shows that in nearly two thirds of military trauma cases — a rate far higher than with civilian trauma injuries — these patients suffer abnormal bone growth in their soft tissue due to a condition known as heterotopic ossification, a painful experience that can greatly limit future mobility.

Although recent experimental treatments offer some hope for expedited recovery, many of these new approaches remain static in nature. For instance, some “smart” bandages emit a continuous weak electric field or locally deliver drugs. Alternatively, hydrogel scaffolds laced with a drug can recruit stem cells, while decellularized tissue re-seeded with donor cells from the patient help avoid rejection by the host's immune system. These newer approaches may indeed encourage growth of otherwise non-regenerative tissue, but because they do not adapt to the changing state of a wound, their impact is limited.

“To understand the importance of adaptive treatments that respond to the wound state, consider the case of antibiotic ointments,” Sheehan explained. “People use antibiotics to treat simple cuts, and they help if the wound is infected. However, completely wiping out the natural microbiota can impair healing. Thus, without feedback, antibiotics can become counterproductive.”

Recent technologies have begun to close the loop between sensing and intervention, looking for signs of infection such as changes in pH level or temperature to trigger treatment. To date, however, these systems have been limited to monitoring changes induced by bacteria. For BETR, DARPA intends to use any available signal, be it optical, biochemical, bioelectronic, or mechanical, to directly monitor the body's physiological processes and then to stimulate them to bring them under control, thereby speeding healing or avoiding scarring or other forms of abnormal healing.

By the conclusion of the four-year BETR program, DARPA expects researchers to demonstrate a closed-loop, adaptive system that includes sensors to assess wound state and track the body's complex responses to interventions; biological actuators that transmit appropriate biochemical and biophysical signals precisely over space and time to influence healing; and adaptive learning approaches to process data, build models, and determine interventions. To succeed, the BETR system must yield faster healing of recalcitrant wounds, superior scar-free healing, and/or the ability to redirect abnormally healing wounds toward a more salutary pathway.

DARPA anticipates that successful teams will include expertise in bioelectronics, artificial intelligence, biosensors, tissue engineering, and cellular regeneration. Further, DARPA encourages proposals that address healing following osseointegration surgery, which is often necessary to support the use of advanced prosthetics by wounded warfighters.

DARPA will host a Proposers Day on March 1, 2019 in Arlington, Virginia, to provide more information to researchers interested in submitting a proposal for funding. Additional information is available at https://go.usa.gov/xENCQ. A forthcoming Broad Agency Announcement, to be posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website, will include full details of the program.

https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-02-06a

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3 avril 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval

Top Marine ‘signaling’ to industry that F-35 cuts are on the table
By: Aaron Mehta How will US Marines adjust for the future fight? | Reagan Defense Forum 2019 WASHINGTON — The top officer in the U.S. Marine Corps is sticking to the planned procurement of the F-35 joint strike fighter — but indicated a willingness to cut planes in the future if analysis says it makes sense. Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger told reporters Wednesday that he is a firm believer in the capabilities the F-35 is bringing, in particular the jump-jet B model favored by the service. However, Berger made it clear he's not wedded to long-term procurement plans, at a time the corps is shedding legacy missions as it pivots to focus to a primarily naval-focused service. “Right now, the program of record plows ahead as it is,” he said. “But I'm signaling to the industry, we have to be prepared to adjust as the operating environment adjusts. Right now, the program of record stays the same, but we will — we must — adapt to the adversary and we must adapt to the operating environment that we're challenged with being in.” Berger noted that an upcoming independent review of his force posture plans, expected to be completed in the next few months, could be a forcing function for more changes. Already, his planning guidance to the corps changed how many planes are featured in each F-35 squad, from 16 to 10. Longstanding plans call for the Marines to procure 353 of the F-35B and 67 of the F-35C carrier variants. “There's nothing like it,” Berger said of the jet. “The F-35B, the ability to operate from austere airfields and ships both, [is] incredible. In wargames, it's one of the handful of capabilities that really caused an adversary problems, because it is so flexible, it's deployable ashore or from ship. Gamechanger is sort of an overused phrase, but I'm a huge advocate of the F-35 and its capabilities.” Broadly speaking, Berger said, what will drive how many F-35s are in a squadron going forward, or how many the Corps eventually buys, comes down to maintenance — a longstanding issue for the stealthy jet. “If the maintenance readiness of the F-35 proves to be very, very strong, then of course, like any other system you need less of them because more of them are up all the time. On the other hand, if it turns out not to be so, then you're going to need more of them, to account for the ones that are in repair, that are down right now,” he said. Complicating that issue is what he called the “unique” supply chain for the jet, which in theory lets parts flow in from all over the world, as opposed to the traditional U.S. based supply. “In all aspects, we absolutely know we will learn along the way, and if its appropriate we will make adjustments” to either the squad level or the overall buy, Berger said. “But it's not a lack of confidence in the airframe at all.” https://www.defensenews.com/air/2020/04/01/top-marine-signaling-to-industry-that-f-35-cuts-are-on-the-table/
29 juin 2020 | International, Terrestre

Leonardo DRS wins Army network installation contract
Andrew Eversden The Army program executive office responsible for network modernization awarded Leonardo DRS a $206 million contract to provide vehicle installation kits for network systems, the company announced June 25. The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract, awarded by Army PEO Command, Control, Communications-Tactical and Project Manager Mission Command, has a performance period of three years with seven option years. Leonardo DRS will provide “cables, brackets and other associated hardware” to support the installation of the next-generation Mounted Family of Computer Systems II, which includes tablets, processors and ruggedized displays. “These are mission-critical components of the Army's Mission Command capability. We are proud to have been selected for high-volume production and delivery of quality, reliable systems for use in almost every type of tactical platform,” said Bill Guyan, senior vice president and general manager of the Leonardo DRS Land Electronics business unit. In June 2018, Leonardo DRS won an $841 million contract to provide the Army with MFoCS II technology. MFoCS II is the service's combat computing platform. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/06/26/leonardo-drs-wins-army-network-installation-contract/
4 février 2019 | International, C4ISR

DARPA: Building Trusted Human-Machine Partnerships
A key ingredient in effective teams – whether athletic, business, or military – is trust, which is based in part on mutual understanding of team members' competence to fulfill assigned roles. When it comes to forming effective teams of humans and autonomous systems, humans need timely and accurate insights about their machine partners' skills, experience, and reliability to trust them in dynamic environments. At present, autonomous systems cannot provide real-time feedback when changing conditions such as weather or lighting cause their competency to fluctuate. The machines' lack of awareness of their own competence and their inability to communicate it to their human partners reduces trust and undermines team effectiveness. To help transform machines from simple tools to trusted partners, DARPA today announced the Competency-Aware Machine Learning (CAML) program. CAML aims to develop machine learning systems that continuously assess their own performance in time-critical, dynamic situations and communicate that information to human team-members in an easily understood format. “If the machine can say, ‘I do well in these conditions, but I don't have a lot of experience in those conditions,' that will allow a better human-machine teaming,” said Jiangying Zhou, a program manager in DARPA's Defense Sciences Office. “The partner then can make a more informed choice.” That dynamic would support a force-multiplying effect, since the human would know the capabilities of his or her machine partners at all times and could employ them efficiently and effectively. In contrast, Zhou noted the challenge with state-of-the-art autonomous systems, which cannot assess or communicate their competence in rapidly changing situations. “Under what conditions do you let the machine do its job? Under what conditions should you put supervision on it? Which assets, or combination of assets, are best for your task? These are the kinds of questions CAML systems would be able to answer,” she said. Using a simplified example involving autonomous car technology, Zhou described how valuable CAML technology could be to a rider trying to decide which of two self-driving vehicles would be better suited for driving at night in the rain. The first vehicle might communicate that at night in the rain it knows if it is seeing a person or an inanimate object with 90 percent accuracy, and that it has completed the task more than 1,000 times. The second vehicle might communicate that it can distinguish between a person and an inanimate object at night in the rain with 99 percent accuracy, but has performed the task less than 100 times. Equipped with this information, the rider could make an informed decision about which vehicle to use. DARPA has scheduled a pre-recorded webcast CAML Proposers Day for potential proposers on February 20, 2019. Details are available at: https://go.usa.gov/xE9aQ. The CAML program seeks expertise in machine learning, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, knowledge representation and reasoning, autonomous system modeling, human-machine interface, and cognitive computing. To maximize the pool of innovative proposal concepts, DARPA strongly encourages participation by non-traditional proposers, including small businesses, academic and research institutions, and first-time Government contractors. DARPA anticipates posting a CAML Broad Agency Announcement solicitation to the Federal Business Opportunities website in mid-February 2019. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-01-31

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