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How Much Water To Carry For A Mission? There's An App For That

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Water is important, that is a fact. An army won't go far without water and thus, it's very much one of the few things that a soldier should never forget. But carrying enough water for a mission is always a tricky business. Carry too much and it will be a heavy load and if you carry too little, then you put a mission in jeopardy as soldiers will become thirsty, get dehydrated, and performance will go down arising from heat-related issues.

Now, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine (USARIEM) have created an Android app that will help soldiers estimate the amount of water they need to carry.

Called the Soldier Water Estimation Tool (SWET), this app takes into consideration the activity planned whether if it's a training or a combat mission, environmental conditions, clothing,  and how long the mission shall take. This takes off the problem of making paper-based estimation with a mobile phone app that simplifies things and can be easily carried along.

According to the developers, the SWET app uses a biophysical and physiological sweat prediction model combined with simple user inputs such as activity, clothing and weather to return an estimated water requirement, which will be in liters per hour. It also has estimation tool for units called a “Mission Calculator” that estimates the total water requirements in liters, canteens or gallons for a given mission, depending on the type of mission, duration and the number of soldiers assigned for the mission.

For the meantime this app is meant for military units, but there is a possibility that there will be a commercial version that sports drink makers can use for sports teams and for humanitarian organizations when responding to disasters. This means that for us airsoft players, we can also plan for our water requirements especially for long missions at airsoft milsim events. 

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