Photo By Senior Airman Amelio Brown | Amy Horne and Annie Carroll, social workers with the True North resiliency program,...... read more read more
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MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, Kan – Approximately 70 Airmen participated in the pilot test of a sleep data collection application known as Adaptive Intervention for Resilience Enhancement, or AIRE app, over a 30-day period that started on June 11, 2025.
NOCTEM Health, a company whose stated purpose is to overcome barriers to delivery and access to evidence based behavioral sleep, developed the application and partnered with True North, a military resilience program, to provide a free trial of the AIRE app to Airmen at McConnell as well as Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska.
Airmen who volunteered for the pilot test were assigned a provider to work with throughout the 30 days. The Airmen enter their sleep patterns, and the app is designed to give them personalized, evidence-based and military-relevant self-management strategies to optimize sleep, mitigate fatigue, and manage emerging behavioral health challenges.
Annie Carroll, a True North social worker with the 22nd Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, led the charge in soliciting the volunteers at McConnell. Working with Airmen who persevere through long hours and shift work, she has firsthand experience with seeing the effects of these stressors.
“With us working 24-hour ops [operations], we really lack the resources for those who switch shifts a lot,” Annie explained. “Over the last couple months, we’ve had a very high ops tempo with a lot of short notice things going on, so stress has been high and I’d love for this to be something we can use.”
People may be aware that copious amounts of stress can have a negative impact on one’s life. However, awareness of the potential effects poor sleep can have on suicidal ideations may be less known. A psychiatric study produced by the Standford School of Medicine and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that, among mostly young adults, that highly variable sleep patterns worsened their suicide risk independent of depression diagnosis.
According to the latest Department of Defense annual suicide report for the 2023 calendar year, 523 servicemembers died by suicide, and most of them young adult men. While suicide is a multifaceted issue, Annie believes the correlation between the affliction and poor sleep should not be overlooked.
“I don’t know if people know, but sleep issues are one of the leading indicators of suicide,” said Mrs. Carroll. “There’s usually some higher level of mental health risk when it comes to [poor] sleep. So, it’s really a prevention tool we can use for suicide awareness and that’s something I really like about it”
After completion of the trial period, the data will be assessed by NOCTEM and sent to the True North representatives. The hope for this trial run is for the data to be used as justification to acquire greater resources for Airmen and military members alike, to mitigate the deleterious effects that poor sleep and stress can have on their lives.
In the long run, increased access to behavioral health technologies has the potential to help the military decode common issues they continue to deal with when it comes to their service member’s well-being. The military can be demanding, and it can’t be overlooked that it’s comprised of real people with individual lives and unique dispositions. However, people will always need to sleep, and the mission will always need to continue.
| Date Taken: | 07.31.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 08.06.2025 12:02 |
| Story ID: | 544825 |
| Location: | MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, KANSAS, US |
| Web Views: | 387 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Airmen test sleep data app, by SrA Amelio Brown, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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