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Walter Piper1, Pawan Lapborisuth1, Avram Horowitz1, Adam Molnar1, Alicia Howell-Munson1
1Neurable Inc., Boston, MA, USA
Abstract
Background: Blast overpressure exposure during military breaching operations poses a significant risk for mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Current safety protocols rely heavily on “minimum safe distance” (MSD) and subjective symptom reporting, often failing to capture immediate physiological effects. A major gap exists in the ability to monitor cognitive health in real-time during exposure events.
Methods: This study utilized the Ops-Core AMP Neuro headset, a novel EEG-integrated hearing protection system, to collect longitudinal brain health data from military and law enforcement personnel during a multi-day breaching training program. Data collection included resting-state "cognitive snapshots" (eyes-open/eyes-closed) before and after exercises, as well as passive background monitoring during live fire events.
Results: Analysis of the resting-state power band metrics revealed increased Theta power, increased Delta power, and reduced Alpha power across the cohort over the course of the training week. In at least one user, real-time spectral analysis identified a distinct "ramp up" of Theta activity occurring approximately 10 minutes following blast exposure. Furthermore, increased slow-wave activity and decreased fast-wave activity showed significant correlations with behavioral reports of mTBI symptoms.
Conclusion: This study presents the first-ever neural dataset collected during live blast overpressure exposure. The findings provide evidence that wearable, EEG-integrated hearing protection can successfully identify objective biomarkers of mTBI in operational environments, offering a viable pathway for real-time brain health monitoring.
2 Distraction Stroop Tasks experiment: The Stroop Effect (also known as cognitive interference) is a psychological phenomenon describing the difficulty people have naming a color when it's used to spell the name of a different color. During each trial of this experiment, we flashed the words “Red” or “Yellow” on a screen. Participants were asked to respond to the color of the words and ignore their meaning by pressing four keys on the keyboard –– “D”, “F”, “J”, and “K,” -- which were mapped to “Red,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Yellow” colors, respectively. Trials in the Stroop task were categorized into congruent, when the text content matched the text color (e.g. Red), and incongruent, when the text content did not match the text color (e.g., Red). The incongruent case was counter-intuitive and more difficult. We expected to see lower accuracy, higher response times, and a drop in Alpha band power in incongruent trials. To mimic the chaotic distraction environment of in-person office life, we added an additional layer of complexity by floating the words on different visual backgrounds (a calm river, a roller coaster, a calm beach, and a busy marketplace). Both the behavioral and neural data we collected showed consistently different results in incongruent tasks, such as longer reaction times and lower Alpha waves, particularly when the words appeared on top of the marketplace background, the most distracting scene.
Interruption by Notification: It’s widely known that push notifications decrease focus level. In our three Interruption by Notification experiments, participants performed the Stroop Tasks, above, with and without push notifications, which consisted of a sound played at random time followed by a prompt to complete an activity. Our behavioral analysis and focus metrics showed that, on average, participants presented slower reaction times and were less accurate during blocks of time with distractions compared to those without them.
