Charles River Analytics Inc., developer of intelligent systems solutions, has announced a contract to build a disease outbreak prediction system for the US Army, as part of continued efforts in advanced, agile, customer-focused engineering. The two-year contract, awarded by the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, is valued close to $1 million.
Infectious diseases are a serious threat to armed forces worldwide. Charles River is building a system to Predict and Analyze Novel and emerging Diseases Enabled by Models of Infection Conditions, or PANDEMIC, to inform decision makers of risks in areas of operations.
“In thinking about future Army operations, a great deal of attention is focused on kinetic aspects of likely conflicts,” said Mr. Michael Farry, Vice President, Socio-Cognitive Systems at Charles River and Program Manager on the PANDEMIC effort. “Relatively few people are thinking about how to forecast and prepare for the spread of infectious diseases. PANDEMIC’s approach changes the game by enabling forward-deployed Army units to foresee infectious disease threats and pack the supplies they’ll need in megacities and other future environments.”
PANDEMIC includes four key components to support the prediction of disease outbreaks: (1) a library contains a database of individual infectious disease conditions; (2) model development capabilities to help define conditions and their probability in a designated location; (3) visualization support aids to present the results to users, enabling them to review predictions based on contextual data; and (4) a mitigation prioritization tool that allows decision makers to compare preventative strategies and their anticipated impact.
PANDEMIC will help Army units strategize medical planning and resource allocation, supporting operational plans through identification and prediction of emerging infectious diseases across areas of operations. By leveraging known risk factors for mitigation of potential personnel exposure, PANDEMIC will enhance preventative measures for health workers in a variety of related organizations.
Charles River is partnering with Epidemico, Inc., on the effort. Epidemico will validate PANDEMIC’s predictive models.
PANDEMIC is Charles River’s latest effort in healthcare support and training, reflecting its commitment to engineering focused on improving the lives of Warfighters and Veterans. Other efforts include surgical training systems, a first-aid training framework, artificial intelligence-enabled online communities to support recovering amputees, therapeutic applications, decision aids, healthcare data analytics, sensors and sensing technology, and mobile training technology.
See other examples of our Healthcare Support and Training efforts.
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC) under Contract No. W81XWH-16-C-0077. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USAMRAA.
