Digital soldiers: Transforming personalized health in challenging and changing environments

The military is a major partner and driving force in medical transformation. This is borne of the necessity to solve problems and implement best available strategies for protection and treatment of soldiers. Medicine in austere environments such as isolated locations with limited power and communications access is a special challenge. The new military era of persistent low level conflict is a further challenge with changing operational needs, particularly involving increased humanitarian assistance in unstable countries. These present new solvable problems for medical science and technology particularly in the realm of mobile health monitoring and training (e.g. cell phone applications), interoperable medical standards for coalition forces, and a personalized electronic health record. The demonstration of what works in military medicine has broad dual use applications for civilian medicine.