A Center for Innovation

Health data where it is hardest to get

The USC Center for Body Computing builds the software, sensors, and analytics that measure health and performance continuously in austere environments, and returns that data in real time to the people it came from.

Across USC

CBC works across the Viterbi School of Engineering, the Keck School of Medicine, and the Institute for Creative Technologies, and teaches and mentors graduate students in all three.

USC CBC

Research devices on the dash of a Humvee during a training rotation at the National Training Center, with an armored vehicle visible outside.

By the numbers

in DoW-funded research

Service Members enrolled

blast events recorded

of digital health research at USC

The USC Center for Body Computing has conducted more than $14 million in DoW-funded research, including $6.9 million focused on Service Member brain health.

What we do

Most health measurement happens at rest, on a clinic schedule, from someone reporting how they feel. Ours does not.

We measure Service Members during force-on-force rotations, on breaching ranges, and across deployment cycles. We measure surgeons through long operative days and patients between appointments. Nobody stops what they are doing to be studied.

That constraint shapes what we build: software that works without a network, sensors people will wear for six months, diagnostics that run at the training site instead of a reference lab days later, and data that goes back to the individual immediately.

What makes it work

Software built for the field. CBC Lightning is a secure mobile research platform that integrates wearable sensors, continuous glucose monitoring, and repeated cognitive testing into one system, holds data when there is no signal, and shows each Service Member their own trends.

Sensors and diagnostics. Wearables, metabolic monitors, force plates, and blood biomarkers of neural injury, run in the field for same-day results.

Clinicians in the loop. Our studies are designed and read by physicians, which is why the same platform moves between a reconnaissance battalion and a Keck Medicine clinic.