Chad Haering has designed and tested personal water chilling systems for troops in the desert, helmet sensors that detect concussions, and exoskeletons for soldiers. For 26 years, he has worked at the U.S. Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center (DEVCOM SC) in Natick, Massachusetts. As Chad describes it, “Natick does the research and development for anything a soldier wears, lives in, sleeps in, jumps out of a plane with, or eats.”

 

The 78-acre campus is like a playground for product innovation and design. It contains textile evaluation chambers for testing the thermal and vapor-resistance values of uniforms; Doriot Climatic Chambers that can simulate snow, rain, wind, and weather conditions; a metabolic kitchen for designing food and MREs (Meals, Read to Eat) to optimize nutrition as well as physical and cognitive performance; and a biomechanics research lab where scientists analyze soldiers in motion, measuring muscle nerve activity, oxygen function, and locomotion efficiency. Even after spending his entire career at the Labs, Chad is awed by its capabilities. “There are just so many cool things to see!”

 

Chad was a junior at nearby Framingham High when representatives from the Natick Labs came to campus offering stipends to students interested in assisting in the lab. Chad worked there for two summers, helping Dr. Hie-Joon Kim do high-performance liquid chromatography to cross-link proteins. Dr. Kim helped Chad synthesize his results into a paper, and he was published by the time he headed off to Villanova University to study chemical engineering. After college, Chad returned to the Natick Labs first as a contractor and then two years later as a full-time chemical engineer and project manager in the combat feeding group. Today, he lives in Bedford, Massachusetts, with his wife, Kari, and their two daughters.

 

“The great thing about working at Natick is that there is a diversity of technologies and types of projects,” Chad explains, “so I’ve been able to do many different things.” It can be challenging to transport water to the areas where troops are stationed, so one of Chad’s first projects was creating a mobile greywater recycling unit that would allow field personnel to reuse water for tasks like washing dishes. Chad’s team quickly realized that contracting out the specifications of what they were looking for to private sector specialists was far more efficient than tinkering with plumbing parts in the lab.

 

Chad went back to school to get his MBA at Northeastern and PMP certification, which has allowed him to manage various projects across different technical fields. From greywater, Chad moved to personal water chilling. “It’s disgusting drinking hot water, so how do you keep your water cold in the desert so that you can actually drink it?” After that, Chad was assigned to a project to manufacture and field helmet sensors that would alert medics to possible concussions sustained in combat because too many concussions were going unnoticed and untreated. The complexity of this type of project illustrates the importance of a facility like the Natick Labs. Sensing a concussion requires understanding the forces involved and the threshold for sustaining a concussion. Placing a sensor in the helmet complicates the data because it’s not entirely fixed to the head, so the team had to devise an algorithm to account for the motion of the head and the helmet. Then, they correlated that to data from the field, tracking soldiers involved in a blast or rollover through diagnosis and medical treatment. Although Natick is far removed from the front lines, Chad notes that this kind of project is a sobering reminder of what’s at stake in their work. “You want the project to be successful, but the only way we’re getting data is if an American soldier is getting injured.”

 

Chad’s current role is Exoskeleton Technology Manager at DEVCOM SC. While exoskeletons conjure images of Iron Man, today’s exoskeletons are not the full-body suits you see in Hollywood movies. Instead, they are augmentation tools that help humans lift heavy loads or support them in tasks to reduce fatigue and injury. Some devices are active and use motors and batteries, while others are passive, using straps, springs, and rubber bands. Consider, for example, artillery personnel who lift 98lb artillery rounds. The size and weight of the rounds are awkward, and the rounds must be lifted and placed in a howitzer manually. “The soldiers pick up the rounds and place them into the barrel of a gun over and over, and there are a lot of back injuries, so we are looking at systems to offload some of the forces,” says Chad.

 

Exoskeletons could also be used to support soldiers in tasks like breaking down doors, digging and filling sandbags, preventing injury, and promoting recovery after parachuting. Once Chad’s team believes that a system has benefits and it has been tested in the biomechanical lab, they bring it to the medics, sustainment, and artillery personnel in the field to see if they find it beneficial. “We’re going to put exoskeletons in various use cases this year to see how they help the Army operationally.”

 

In his time at Natick, Chad has learned about concussions from physicians, the characteristics of electronics designed for blunt versus blast impact from electrical engineers, how exoskeletons can support human movement from biomechanists and ergonomists, and Army culture from unit leaders testing their designs in the field. “With all the internal capabilities that we have in Natick, my favorite aspect of this work is the camaraderie of bringing together a project team and then working with an Army unit somewhere to test a product or technology,” Chad says. “We’re all working together, and it’s really rewarding.”