Continuous Monitoring of Recruits During Military Basic Training to Mitigate Attrition

Area of Science:

• Military Science
• Human Factors Engineering
• Sports Medicine

Background:

• Military attrition, or voluntary departure, incurs significant costs due to physical and psychological challenges faced by recruits.
• Understanding and mitigating attrition is crucial for military readiness and resource management.
• Current methods for assessing recruit well-being may be burdensome and lack continuous insight.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore the efficacy of wearable technology for monitoring physiological and psychological factors related to attrition in basic military training.
• To develop a minimally invasive, scalable data-capturing methodology for continuous recruit monitoring.
• To identify key indicators of attrition risk using psychometric and physiological data.

Main Methods:

• A cohort of 63 recruits was monitored during basic infantry training using Garmin Fenix 7 wearable devices.
• Data analysis focused on seven key psychometric and physical features derived from questionnaires and wearable sensor data.
• Statistical techniques including Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) were employed to analyze feature spaces.

Main Results:

• Recruits at risk of attrition exhibited distinct clusters in feature space analyses (LDA and PCA).
• Key predictors of attrition included low motivation, low resilience, and a stress-oriented mindset.
• A predictive model using sleep scores and step counts achieved a macro mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.74.

Conclusions:

• Wearable technology offers a viable, unobtrusive method for continuous monitoring of recruits.
• Physiological data from wearables can effectively predict attrition risk, complementing or potentially replacing traditional questionnaires.
• Implementing such technology could significantly reduce the burden of daily wellness assessments and improve attrition mitigation strategies.