Updates

Applied Research Associates Inc. Wins Contract to Develop BioGears, Army's Human Physiology Engine

Applied Research Associates, Inc. (ARA, www.ara.com) has been awarded a multiyear, $7 million contract by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC) in Fort Detrick, MD under Contract Number: W81XWH-13-2-0068.

ARA’s biomedical research team will develop BioGears™ (www.biogearsengine.com), an open-source physiology engine to allow for distributed collaboration and consistent simulation across the medical training community. The BioGears™ physiology engine will model human response to trauma and treatment and will include physiologically accurate models for multiple systems, including cardiovascular, respiratory, renal and endocrine.

BioGears™ is based on a common data model that will create standard inputs and outputs, making it easy to extend existing and add new physiology models. BioGearsTM will provide a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for real-time retrieval of accurate physiology state. This allows for easy integration with immersive medical education software built on popular game engines such as the award-winning Unreal® Engine technology and Unity® game engine. BioGearsTM will be a GCC compliant, C++ library.

Joint Program Committee 1 - Medical Training and Health Information Sciences Research Program (JPC1) and the U.S. Army’s Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC, www.tatrc.org) will administer the program.

The main goals for BioGears™ are:

  • Create a comprehensive, extensible human physiology engine that will drive medical training technologies
  • Create a publicly available physiology research platform that enables accurate and consistent simulated physiology across training applications
  • Lower the barrier to create medical training content
  • Engage the community to develop and extend physiology models
  • Meet the training needs of the military
  • Expand the body of knowledge about the use of simulated physiology for medical education

“Our team is thrilled to have been selected by TATRC. This project is one of great importance to the medical simulation community and the advancement of immersive medical training technologies. We look forward to creating the most comprehensive, open source mathematical model of human physiology available,” said Jerry Heneghan, BioGearsTM principal investigator at ARA.

About Applied Research Associates, Inc. (ARA) Applied Research Associates, Inc. (ARA) is an international research and engineering company recognized for providing technically excellent solutions to complex and challenging problems in the physical sciences. Our mission is to provide in-depth and diversified research, engineering, and technical support services. We have a broad range of technical expertise in biomedical engineering, defense technologies, civil engineering, computer software and simulation, systems analysis and environmental technologies. For additional information, please visit www.ara.com.

Unreal, Unreal Engine and UE3 are trademarks or registered trademarks of Epic Games, Inc. in the United States of America and elsewhere. Unity® is a trademark of Unity Technologies. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

For more information contact: Jenn Carter Phone: 919.582.3438 Email: jcarter@ara.com Website: www.ara.com