The Defense Department’s (DoD) Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) is seeking a commercial AI solution for organizations to support personnel who “exhibit behavioral changes that may indicate increased vulnerability.”
DIU identifies “vulnerability” as circumstances and behaviors that could lead members at “higher risk of involvement in activities and situations likely to produce unwanted or negative outcomes” for other members or the mission.
“Enhancing analytic capability would enable the DoD to better triage and care for members in need while decreasing false positives that strain existing resources,” DIU said. “Accurately recognizing and quickly responding to vulnerability could reduce the number of associated negative outcomes.”
The AI solution will, among other things, must do the following:
- Build and maintain behavioral models to represent individuals over time;
- Identify individual behavioral deviations from their unique baselines along with anomaly detection based on user-provided guidelines;
- Enable proactive measures to reduce members’ vulnerability and the number of associated negative outcomes;
- Steer support professionals directly to the most acute individual needs; and
- Comply with privacy, civil liberties, ethics, legal authority, and other business considerations.
“Successful prototypes for this use-case could translate beyond high-risk triage to support broader population segments across the mental health continuum,” DIU said. The prototype project will be a 12-month competition with responses due by May 5, 2020.
