Individualized Behavioral Health Monitoring Tool

The Individualized Behavioral Health Monitoring Tool can be adapted to meet an articulated need to track behavioral health in occupations associated with high stress, high workload and high danger factor such as military applications and law enforcement. A tool that enables the systematic and efficient tracking of individual behavioral health status in these occupational settings can provide a means to detect and address behavioral disorders and mental conditions at an early stage. Taking military operations as an example, there is evidence that behavioral disorders and mental conditions such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and traumatic brain injury have a high prevalence among soldiers. There is a present market opportunity to deliver an Individualized Behavioral Health Monitoring Tool to track changes in behavioral health status in soldiers during training, deployment, and post-deployment. The Army currently has 238,000 soldiers deployed overseas in 120 countries (source: US Army, 2006).

The Individualized Behavioral Health Monitoring Tool will meet the specific requirements of long duration exploration missions and provide feedback to astronauts, Op Psy Personnel and Flight Surgeons about behavioral health status as well as aid in the selection of countermeasures. It will be designed to be unobtrusive and require minimal crew time or effort to train and utilize. The resulting product will be primarily relevant to NASA's Behavioral Health and Performance (BHP) research gaps (as of July 2009): BMED 3 (What are the optimal methods to detect and assess decrements in behavioral health during exploration missions?) but will also be relevant to gaps BMED1, BMED2, BMED6, BMED7, and BMED8. When validated, the Individualized Behavioral Health Monitoring Tool will be deployed in long-duration space exploration missions to support crew behavioral health efforts during training, mission and return to Earth. More »