Every soldier is a sensor.
Every sensor has a heartbeat.
Man-down before the radio call.
A soldier wears a body-area network — heart rate and an ECG trace, SpO₂, core temperature, an IMU fall channel — gathered at an on-body hub and carried beside their position. The console reads one life-safety-first colour: panic and man-down outrank a jam, a lost link, and a low battery. The vitals are governed as friendly biometric data — retention-classed and held back from egress by default.
SQUAD VITALS
Man-down before the radio call.
A soldier going down rarely calls it in — they are unconscious, pinned, or both. The IMU and accelerometer read the fall first: a hard impact followed by stillness raises a man-down on its own, ahead of any voice on the net. Beside it sits a thumb-reachable panic, and the on-body integrity subset — tamper, jam, low-battery — where the wearable reports on its own ability to keep reporting.
LIFE-SAFETY EVENTS
Posture, impact, and stillness are weighed together — the heuristic keys on how a soldier falls and stays down, not on a button they must reach.
Panic is the soldier-initiated counterpart, ranked level with man-down at the top of the precedence order.
Every unacknowledged event collapses into one header dot: panic and man-down outrank jam, jam outranks a lost link, a lost link outranks low battery.
Acknowledging an event desaturates its row and releases the header — the collapsed dot always reads the highest signal still unanswered.
A panic or man-down from one soldier surfaces against the callsigns nearest to them, not just the wearer.
A heartbeat as telemetry.
The soldier is a sensor with a heartbeat. Worn vitals gather at an on-body hub and carry beside the soldier’s position — validated on the body, sampled at a fixed cadence, and folded into the life-safety picture the moment a threshold is crossed.
BAN · SAMPLE 1 Hz
A body-area network aggregates worn sensors — heart rate, SpO₂, core temperature, respiration, GSR, and an IMU — at an on-body hub over short-range BLE / ANT+.
The ECG channel traces the PQRST beat; the hub flashes on each R wave, so a stopped heart is visible, not merely a missing number.
Each vital is a validated, range-checked reading, with out-of-range values rejected at the edge before they can mislead the picture.
A threshold breach — tachycardia, hypoxia, heat-stress — raises a life-safety event, never a silent gauge a watchstander must notice.
Sample rate is the acquisition cadence of the sensor, kept distinct from the heart cadence the ECG traces — the two are never one number.
One colour, life-safety first.
A soldier’s worn vitals and man-down collapse onto a single life-safety colour, read off a precedence ladder that rises — nominal, low-battery, stale, offline, jammed, man-down, panic. Connectivity outranks charge: a stale or offline link sits above low-battery, so a soldier you have lost contact with never reads as merely flat.
LIVENESS · LIFE-SAFETY COLOUR
SUMMARY · PANIC
VITALS → LIFE-SAFETY STATE
IMU / accel
fall + stillnessPanic
soldier-pressedHeart rate
tachycardiaSpO₂
hypoxiaCore temp
heat-stressONE COLOUR · HIGHEST BREACH WINS
When alerts stack on one soldier, the highest rung wins — the summary colour is always the worst live state, never a blend or an average.
Every rung shows who is holding it: the callsigns currently in each state sit against the ladder, so a summary colour is always traceable to a soldier.
Panic and man-down sit at the top and outrank every connectivity and battery state beneath them.
A vitals threshold breach raises an amber life-safety state, not a silent gauge a watchstander must catch.
Every state is a colour, a word, and a redundant glyph together — colourblind-safe and AA-contrast.
SEE ALSO
The two-axis liveness / readiness model and the canonical precedence ladder are detailed in Force; the wearable adds only the on-body fold.
Worn on the body, built for the field.
A body-worn bearer answers to constraints a mounted radio never sees — the antenna, the battery, the housing and the radio budget all live on a soldier’s body, in the field, for days at a time. The on-body distinction is physical: engineered for the dismount rather than adapted from the vehicle.
ON-BODY LINK · SURVIVABILITY
BODY-WORN BEARER
LINK MARGIN
BODY-SHADOW · HELD
Ruggedized to IP68 and MIL-STD-810H — immersion, dust, shock and sweat — the wearable survives a soldier going prone in mud or fording a river, not just a desk.
Antenna placement is tuned for on-body propagation, holding link margin when the soldier’s own body shadows the bearer.
Battery endurance is sized for a multi-day dismounted patrol, where there is no alternator and no spare to swap.
The body-area hub keeps worn sensors on short-range BLE / ANT+, conserving the long-haul radio budget for what has to leave the body.
Worn weight, snag profile and heat against skin are part of the design envelope, not an afterthought a soldier carries.
Battery, backhaul, jam, last-fix.
On the map each soldier is one live track; the board below is the same soldiers as a roster. Freshness is the load-bearing triage primitive — the single question a watchstander asks of every row is how old its last good fix is.
TRACK · 5 SOLDIERS
LIVE FIXES
Each soldier is one live track row: a liveness dot, callsign, last-fix age, and on-body telemetry chips for battery, backhaul and jam.
Freshness graduates by opacity and an explicit relative age rather than hue, so a stale soldier reads stale at a glance.
Cyan is reserved strictly for live, real-time signal and never for severity; a soldier past their fix cadence reads red on time before liveness even degrades.
A row click flies the central map to the soldier; the common operating picture is never torn down.
Low-battery and jam are both telemetry chips here and rungs on the life-safety ladder — the chip and the event always agree.
SEE ALSO
The telemetry feed and the two-axis liveness / readiness model are detailed in Force; the wearable renders the soldier as a single freshness-graded track.
Friendly biometric data, governed.
A soldier’s vitals are friendly-force readiness data, governed as biometric personal data, never surveillance. The governing terms are fixed before the first reading and enforced at the device edge — which channels a wearable streams, what may leave the friendly picture, and how long anything is kept.
DEVICE PROFILE · CHANNELS
SHARING CONTROL
RETENTION CLASS
T-MINUS 38 D · AUTO-ERASE
Every soldier’s vitals are enrolled under a clear lawful basis and retention rule from the outset — biometric monitoring never begins without one in place.
Vitals egress is blocked by default: only the position channel is permitted to leave the friendly picture, so a soldier’s heart rate never rides out on a shared feed.
Per-device channel profiles: each wearable streams only the vitals its mission role needs, and a thresholds-and-cadence profile is set per device.
Retention is expiry-clocked — biometric history auto-erases on the clock rather than accreting indefinitely.
Erasing a soldier truly removes their biometric history and everything tied to it — a genuine right-to-erasure, not a hidden-but-retained flag.
SEE ALSO
Subject-of-interest governance — mandate, POPIA basis for persons under investigation — is detailed in Graph. Wearables govern friendly biometric data only.
Put a heartbeat on every callsign.
Authenticated, governed, and red before the radio call. Talk to our team about a wearables walkthrough, a body-area-network evaluation over your force, or an integration into your existing operations room.