Our Envisioned Futures

APL will transform the ability to optimize health and improve resilience by developing comprehensive, customizable, and individualized monitoring and intervention technologies. We will seamlessly integrate smart sensing systems into daily activities to capture the full picture of health—biological, environmental, social, and behavioral—to revolutionize health monitoring. This will enable a better understanding of baseline health states, the detection and prediction of deviations, the risk of future adverse health events, and any recommended courses of preventative action. These capabilities will provide the clinician with comprehensive information beyond what is conceivable today, while also giving individuals agency over daily health decisions informed by their own data. By providing meaningful near-real-time information, analysis, and recommendations to individuals and to health professionals, we will support better diagnostics, earlier detection, and faster and more effective responses, significantly increasing quality of life.

APL will redefine the delivery of care to be accurate and immediately accessible to anyone, anywhere. No longer will hospitals and doctors’ offices be the primary places to receive care. We will make harms caused by clinicians and health systems a thing of the past. Integrated and intelligent systems will be designed and deployed with a holistic view of the entire health ecosystem. Deployed capabilities will seamlessly restore health across urban, rural, and austere environments in peacetime or in conflict.

APL will create transformational capabilities that shape a future where humanity can anticipate and take preemptive action to mitigate health threats worldwide. By developing novel measures, integrating disparate data sources at population scales, and applying new analytic methods, the world will have widespread situational awareness about potential outbreaks and other health threats, both naturally occurring and human-made. We will devise new methods to proactively enable resilience and facilitate timely and effective response in the population. No longer will diseases spread before symptoms are seen and recognized. These capabilities will be used widely across civilian and military domains.