SAN DIEGO — After several successful at-sea trials, Naval Health Research Center (NHRC) has equipped 215 Sailors aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Essex (LHD 2) with advanced wearable biometric devices as the ship embarks for the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2026 exercise, taking place June 26 to Aug. 2.
Using Oura smart rings, NHRC researchers will actively monitor critical physiological data among the crew members, including sleep patterns, cumulative fatigue levels and early biometric markers that could signal shipboard illnesses.
Researchers are looking to leverage early biometric warnings for illness prevention, empowering medical staff to intervene before disease spreads and reduce the loss of days and manpower to sickness.
Ship leadership can use this data to optimize crew health, mitigate risks to readiness and maintain fleet capabilities during at-sea operations.
“Identifying a Sailor who is starting to get sick early not only would allow for early intervention to hopefully help them recover quicker, but may also allow for reduced spread of illness throughout the rest of the ship,” said Alice LaGoy, a physiology researcher with NHRC. “This could keep the rest of the crew healthy and allow them to maintain operational performance.”
This collaboration with Essex is a direct expansion of NHRC's ongoing research effort with wearable technology. During RIMPAC 2024, NHRC's Warfighter Performance Department successfully outfitted approximately 200 Sailors aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur (DDG 54) with similar smart rings and watches.
For the 2026 study aboard Essex, researchers are independently evaluating wearable illness risk algorithms on a larger deck platform. Once validated during RIMPAC, NHRC plans to integrate these bio-threat detection algorithms into the Command Readiness, Endurance and Watchstanding (CREW) system for follow-on fleet demonstrations next year.
“This is the third iteration of wearable devices I’ve seen NHRC integrate and they continue to adapt and refine these mechanisms,” said Capt. Edison Rush, Essex’s executive officer. “The health and welfare of the crew really dictate our ability to be mission capable. If we’re able to look at what mitigations can be put into place before we encounter a negative incident, we want that knowledge as leaders.”
Data collected in 2024 was used to test the CREW program and feed biometric sleep data into the Optimized Watchbill Logistics (OWL) system. The CREW program is designed to mitigate fleet-wide fatigue and optimize human performance by evaluating Sailor endurance. Working in tandem, the OWL software operationalizes this data to generate fatigue-informed watch schedules, allowing ship leadership to assign duties based on actual rest levels rather than just availability.
By using wearable technology to accurately assess duty fitness, NHRC continues to pioneer data-driven solutions to ensure maximum health and readiness monitoring and medical readiness across the surface fleet.
NHRC, part of Navy Medicine Research & Development, supports Navy, Marine Corps and joint U.S. warfighter health readiness and lethality with research and development that delivers high-value, high-impact solutions to the health and readiness challenges that the U.S. military population faces on the battlefield, at-sea, home and abroad.