DARPA Triage Challenge

Background
The goal of the MTC is to galvanize discovery of novel traumatic injury signatures to enhance triage decision-making in austere, complex, and mass-casualty settings. DARPA is soliciting innovative proposals in the domain of signature identification for primary and secondary triage.

Work Details
The DARPA Triage Challenge requires competitors to develop systems for real-time initial assessment of casualty status based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) or near-COTS stand-off collection and analysis of physiological data that can scale to mass casualty incidents (MCIs). The system should include sensor packs, sensor-delivery platforms, signature-identification algorithms and processing hardware, and a user interface. Competitors are expected to provide real-time information on casualty location, injury classification, and time to complete casualty assessments. The competition will focus on identifying urgent casualties before the opportunity to address life-saving interventions would have closed. DARPA expects competitors to adopt a particular triage guideline to provide overall priority recommendations for each casualty (e.g., “Immediate”, “Delayed”, “Minimal”, “Deceased”), but scoring is expected to be based on detection of injuries that would be needed to establish priority in any of the triage guidelines.

The system should be versatile and robust to the complex environmental conditions found in real-world scenarios such as battlefield, earthquake, explosion, or mass shooting incidents. Competitors are expected to use multi-modal approaches including LIDAR, acoustic, visual, RF, IR, UV, radar, gravity, compass/magnetic, GPS, and chemical sensors capable of detecting desired signatures from a minimum distance of 1 meter. Robotic platforms such as uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) and uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs) will carry the sensor packs and any associated computation and communications hardware. The courses will be modeled after real events such as battlefield scenarios with various observation and navigation hazards. Competitors should expect both constrained areas with human-crawlable cross sections as well as larger open spaces that could include large debris or crowds.