There is a pressing need in the military for a system that interprets data from a suite of wearable physiological sensors to infer a soldier's current clinical state on the battlefield. The Warfighter Physiology Status Monitoring (WPSM) concept is envisioned by the U.S. Army to address this need. Life sign detection is a key component. In the future the WPSM will consist of an array of biosensors embedded in the soldier's uniform all connected to a central processing control unit containing a computer chip with firmware for assessing the soldier's status. The unit will diagnose and transmit the Dead, Alive or Unknown physiological state to the field medic or elsewhere for status monitoring.

This paper describes the various modules that are found in the Dead/Alive determination algorithms and how they interact with each other, as well as a special simulator system built for use in parametric studies of the overall system. The current development of the firmware is described along with key requirements, outstanding challenges, and near and far-term research directions for the work.