Blue Ring

Police officers are 5x more likely to kill themselves than to be killed by homicide. Nearly 25% of officers leave their department within the first 18-36 months on the job. Long and often rotating shifts, threats of violence, increased need for hypervigilance, and a lack of public support are creating chronic stress in the police force, leading to negative coping behaviors.

When law enforcement officers are experiencing a high volume of stress, either at particular points in their shift or over a prolonged period of time in their careers, their ability to fundamentally hear, see, and make complicated decisions is significantly diminished. Police officer shooting accuracy, arrest and self-defense, and communication all decrease when stress levels are high. The same study shared that officers fired more often on suspects that had already surrendered in high-stress situations. 

Of those who experienced force when coming into contact with police, nearly 51% perceive the use of “excessive force.” Municipalities spend hard-earned tax-payers dollars on settlements between police officers and community members every year for these very interactions. Three cities alone (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles) have each spent an average of $83MM on police-related settlements every year for the past 10 years.

Blue Ring is wearable technology that monitors police officers' biometric data for high-stress indicators. After an initial diagnostic to capture baseline information, when an officer’s stress indicators reach their unique trigger point, Blue Ring alerts the officer and provides on-the-spot instructions on how to decrease their stress levels and regain control of their decision-making abilities.

At the department level, police chiefs are able to monitor the overall health of their officers, track the effectiveness of coping strategies, and use this information to develop tailored inventions for particular stressors officers experience in different regions, agencies, and roles.

Blue Ring will gather, store, and analyze how officer and community characteristics (i.e. age, years on the force) can impact the type and amount of stressors in their job. Blue Ring will enable departments to match officer dispositions to particular calls and/or neighborhoods, decreasing the risk of adverse police encounters for citizens.

With the funding from the Accelerator, we will have the funds to move forward in building our proof-of-concept and testing it with our first police department. We have developed the criteria to select our pilot police department and are engaging police chiefs to engage as our first users.