Today is Veteran’s Day and according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), over 6,000 Veterans die by suicide each year. This is approximately 17 lives lost every day. In response to this crisis, the VA launched Mission Daybreak, a $20 million initiative aimed at reducing Veteran suicides, and awarded USC $1 million to further its research.
The USC Institute for Creative Technologies, a unit of the Viterbi School of Engineering, and Department of Defense University Affiliated Research Center (UARC), sponsored by the US Army, has signed a license agreement with SoldierStrong regarding Battle Buddy for Suicide Prevention, an AI-driven mobile health (mHealth) application tailored exclusively for Veterans. SoldierStrong is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization with a mission to assist America’s military veterans in taking their next steps forward in life after service through the donation of revolutionary medical technologies to Veterans Affairs medical centers and individual veterans across the country. These technologies include wearable robotic exoskeletons to help paralyzed and injured veterans walk again and the BraveMind virtual reality system to treat post-9/11 veterans living with post-traumatic stress (PTS), among several other technologies. Since 2013, SoldierStrong has proudly donated $5.5 million in technology to help injured veterans.
This new license deal, facilitated by the USC Stevens Center for Innovation , enables SoldierStrong to create custom Battle Buddy modules for iOS, with optional use of wearable technologies (e.g., Apple Watch, Garmin) and interactive intelligent agents. The Battle Buddy technology leverages the Rapid Integration & Development Environment (RIDE) real-time prototyping platform, developed at USC ICT and included in the license to SoldierStrong.
Read more about this technology in this ICT article written by Sophia Stuart.
Watch this video to learn more about Battle Buddy.