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The Directorate for Engineering’s Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships’ Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs invites all active SBIR/STTR Phase I grantees to participate in the Phase IB supplemental funding opportunity. Phase IB supplements to Phase I grantees are intended to foster partnerships between strategic partners and investors and the SBIR/STTR companies.

Through this supplemental program, small businesses will be able to effectively leverage funding and investment from interested outside parties on the technology funded in Phase I that could lead to successful commercial products and processes and at the same time provide some of the gap funding required to carry the grantees' effort from Phase I to Phase II.

The objective of the Phase IB option is to extend the R&D efforts beyond the current grant to meet the product/process/software requirements of a third party investor to accelerate the Phase I project to the commercialization stage and enhance the overall strength of the commercial potential of the subsequent Phase II project. The Phase IB option extends the Phase I grant for six months, and the combined Phase I and IB project will typically not exceed one year in duration for the SBIR grant and one and one half years for the STTR grant.

The Pentagon is looking to better train its troops — by scanning their minds as they play video games. Adaptive, mind-reading computer systems have been a work-in-progress among military agencies for at least a decade. In 2000, far-out research agency Darpa launched “Augmented Cognition,” a program that sought to develop computers that used EEG scans to adjust how they displayed information — visually, orally, or otherwise — to avoid overtaxing one realm of a troop’s cognition. The Air Force also took up the idea, by trying to use EEGs to “assess the operator’s actual cognitive state”  and “avoid cognitive bottlenecks before they occur.”

Now, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) is soliciting small business proposals for an even more immersive trainer, one that includes voice-recognition technology, and picks up on vocal tone and facial gestures. The game would then react and adapt to a war-fighter’s every action. For example, if a player’s gesture “insults the local tribal leader,” the trainee would “find that future interactions with the population are more difficult and more hostile.” And, most importantly, the new programs would react to the warrior’s own physiological and neurological cues. They’d be monitored using an EEG, eye tracking, heart and respiration rate, and other physiological markers. Based on the metrics, the game would adapt in difficulty and “keep trainees in an optimal state of learning.”

The OSD isn’t ready to use neuro-based systems in the war zone, but the agency does want to capitalize on advances in neuroscience that have assigned meaningful value to intuitive decision-making. As the OSD solicitation points out, troops often need to make fast-paced decisions in high-stress environments, with limited information and context. Well-reasoned, analytic decisions are rarely possible