Virtual Seminar Series | Human Performance Monitoring and Augmentation: Opportunities for Enhancing Health, Wellness, and Performance

Faculty Candidate Seminar by Josh Hagen, Ph.D

Director – Human Performance Innovation Center

Assistant Professor, Department of Neuroscience

Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute

West Virginia University, School of Medicine

Over the last 10+ years, a number of key enabling factors have made way for the advancement of research and development in Human Performance including smartphones, microelectronics, flexible electronics, biosensors, cloud computing, and data analytics tools.  These technologies have created the ability to pervasively measure physiological parameters 24/7, which allows for an incredible number of opportunities for optimizing Human Performance.  However, many challenges remain.  Monitoring:  many of these tools (i.e., commercial wearable sensors) are not federally regulated, which creates a continuous need for validation assessments to understand the quality of data that is generated.  Understanding:  humans are very complex organisms, so a single model to understand “readiness” or “performance” is extremely unlikely.  Despite those challenges, many of these tools are being used for that exact scenario, which creates a wealth of opportunities in the applied research domain.    

In this seminar, we will discuss the current state of Human Performance Monitoring and Augmentation, near term research and opportunities in elite athletic and military performance, and future efforts in improving health and wellness for the general and clinical populations.

Josh Hagen received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2000, M.S./Ph.D in Materials Science and Engineering in 2004/2006 all from the University of Cincinnati.  Josh executed his graduate research in bioelectronics at the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate at Air Force Research Labs, and shortly after joined the 711^th Human Performance Wing where he began his current research thrust in Human Performance Monitoring and Augmentation.  At the 711^th, Josh started and led the STRONG Team and focused on measuring physiology utilizing wearable sensors and blood biomarkers, developed novel architectures for correlating, modeling, and visualizing the data, all with the end goal to optimize performance in elite military and athletics populations. 

In 2018, Josh became the Director of the Human Performance Innovation Center at the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University, as well as Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience.  Here he leads a multidisciplinary team focused on optimizing the performance of military, athletics, and clinical patient populations.  Notable research programs include: work in designing and launching a Human Performance platform for several services in the DoD as well as multiple NCAA and NFL organizations, continued validation assessment of commercial physiological monitoring technologies, and controlled human subjects research to understand the physiological benefits of next generation recovery modalities.