Imagine: you are an American soldier in a foreign land wired with sensitive
monitors that record and relay every breath you take back to a command post.
When the bullets whiz past you, your erratic breathing alerts your leader back
at command to send in more troops. When you are hit, metabolic changes are
relayed. Medics fly in and save your life.
This is what Andrew Behar sees on the battlefield of the future. This is the
potential Behar is selling now.
"With this, you can really fight smart, instead of fighting macho," Behar
said. "The reason they can't fight smart now is they have no information."
The founder of Ventura, Calif.-based VivoMetrics signed a contract last month
with the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine to deliver a
number of devices that will track soldiers' respiration - one component within a
comprehensive monitoring system the company created called LifeShirt.
Behar, 47, is embarking on a marketing campaign to sell LifeShirt to other
branches of the military, firefighters and others on the front line of saving
lives and property.
LifeShirt is a lightweight, tightly fitting shirt with embedded sensors that
monitors blood pressure, oxygen in the blood, temperature, movement and other
vital signs. As it collects pulmonary, cardiac, posture and activity signals, it
can send them to a remote site or record them in an electronic log. Essentially,
it minimized hospital-room monitoring devices to the size of a Palm Pilot.
"I just got off the phone with the guy who runs a hazardous-cleanup company
in Arizona," Behar said recently. "The temperature in a level A suit can get up
to 148 degrees. There's not a lot of people who can function like that for long
without heat injury. You get cognitive impairment. It endangers your life and
people you are trying to rescue."
It can be a hazardous-chemical suit. It can be firefighter protective gear.
Outside of it, no one knows what's happening to the human being inside. Inside
the suit is a human being so pumped up on adrenaline, he or she isn't aware of
the body's signals.
"These are incredibly brave, unbelievable people," Behar said. "If they had
more information, they would be safer. That's the only thing between them and a
safe, more effective workplace."
Before VivoMetrics, Behar built interactive networks for government, like
kiosks in New York that allowed people to pay parking tickets and reserve
Central Park tennis courts. As the Internet evolved, he evolved with it, moving
to Web-site building. Then he heard about a pulmonary specialist named Marvin
Sackner inventing the technology to monitor patients.
"I was a business guy and heard about it and thought, 'Everyone will want one
of these,' " Behar said. "Imagine one day a doctor will know how you are doing
every minute of the day ... wouldn't it cut down on emergency visits and allow
the doctor to (prescribe) your medicine better?
"It was so obvious, this was what was missing in the doctor-patient
relationships."
He and Sanford Drucker started VivoMetrics in Behar's garage in 1999. They
brought in Paul Kennedy as the CEO and set out to get the venture capital needed
to expand the technology into a wearable shirt.
They got FDA approval for LifeShirt in 2002. The company now has a staff of
35.
VivoMetrics Government Services Inc., was spun off from the main company in
April in order to solicit and procure government contracts. VivoMetrics Inc. has
participated in 102 medical and pharmaceutical studies with 2,212 people wearing
LifeShirts for 6,840 sessions for a total of 85,597 hours, Behar said. Among
those was a study of whether hypnotics, a class of drugs approved by the FDA for
use of treatment of sleep disorders, would depress the respiration of patients
suffering from sleep apnea.
"The question was, is this safe?" said Steven James, a pharmaceutical
consultant based in San Diego. "We found the use of medication had no effect
whatsoever on respiration. We hope to have this published sometime this summer."
The LifeShirts allowed the tests to be conducted while the patients slept in
their own homes, which was much more accurate than using a sleep lab. It also
was less expensive: $500 a person as opposed to $1,000 to $3,000 for a night in
the sleep lab, James said.
Behar declined to specify the price or the number of devices ordered by the
Army because of secrecy in the program, he said. Army spokesmen declined to
comment publicly on the device, although they did approve the press release
issued by VivoMetrics, according to the VivoMetrics public-relations
spokeswoman.
The press release states the respiratory component of the LifeShirt will be
integrated into the Army's Warfighter Physiological Status Monitor-Initial
Capability program.
And while the contract is simply for a component of the LifeShirt, Behar's
marketing over the summer, which he calls "show and tell," is aimed to sell the
entire LifeShirt system. Among the places he will be showing off the technology
is on a burning ship in the Gulf of Mexico.
"We are doing a demonstration with the Navy in a couple weeks," Behar
said.
He said if soldiers had the technology in Iraq today, they would be monitored
for heat stress in the desert environment. The LifeShirt would record soldiers
becoming dehydrated before the soldiers knew it themselves. Then, the dehydrated
soldiers could be taken out of the field for two hours, rehydrated and put back,
instead of losing their skills for a day or two as they recover from heat
injury.
It also can record death, which would allow resources to be deployed more
effectively, Behar said.
Vivometrics
http://www.vivometrics.com/site/index.html
see also:
http://www.usariem.army.mil/wpsm
