Skip to content

CSIS and RCMP Academy: Biosensor Hub Project

When training public safety personnel, it is important to create demanding scenarios that closely replicate real-world conditions. However, it can be difficult for trainers to successfully increase cognitive load and stress levels, leaving students without adequate exposure to the complexities of these environments.

Creating effective training scenarios can be difficult in part due to limited feedback from students, but encouraging research shows that wearable technologies allow for objective, continuous assessment throughout these sessions. A recent project led by CSIS in partnership with the RCMP Academy aimed to integrate a wearable system that assesses physiological stress levels and cognitive loads across a wide variety of training scenarios.

This wearable system, called the Biosensor Hub, makes it possible to monitor up to 16 students at once and receive much-needed feedback to improve training quality. The Cloud option also allows to monitor wearers in “real-life” environments, such as city centers, making it possible to monitor actual training scenarios and even operations in real time.

Scheduled to start this summer, the second phase of the project will explore whether the wearable system could be used for personnel selection, individualizing training, and predicting long-term performance. This could minimize the risk of assigning an unfit member to a specific position or operation, improve the overall efficiency of training, and decrease training costs.  

This project is funded by the Canadian Safety and Security Program, which is a federally-funded program led by Defence Research and Development Canada, in partnership with Public Safety Canada.

READ MORE