The Challenge
A European ministry of defence needed to understand the future of personnel recovery: how isolated, injured, or at-risk personnel could be located, identified, and recovered quickly in locations ranging from domestic training areas to contested environments.
The technology landscape for both localisation and communication was fragmented and fast moving. Emerging approaches spanned mobile ad-hoc networks, satellite communications, signals-of-opportunity, wearable technologies, and GPS-denied navigation techniques. The evidence needed to support confident investment decisions did not exist in one place.
The customer also required expert input throughout the project. This meant rapidly identifying credible deep tech specialists who could help structure the field, validate assumptions, and separate genuine technological potential from market noise.
The Solution
Outsmart deployed its expert network capability to identify, verify, and engage a multidisciplinary panel of specialists. This gave the customer access to scientists, engineers, and commercial leaders working across localisation and communications technologies.
The engagement began by building a technology taxonomy from first principles in consultation with experts. Rather than treating rescue beacons as a single category, technologies were segmented across three dimensions: location transmission technology, communication methodology, and form factor. This created a common framework for comparing different approaches and ensured the research remained broad.
Using this taxonomy as the search framework, Outsmart assembled a balanced expert group from industry, academia, and specialist research organisations. Experts were selected for technical excellence and for complementary perspectives across satellite communications, positioning systems, wireless networking, sensing technologies, emergency response, and commercial technology adoption.
Experts identified 65 organisations offering or developing solutions, with 46 relevant to defence personnel recovery. These organisations were further prioritised based on technical capabilities, technological maturity, operational applicability, and future development potential. Suppliers offering the most promising solutions were then contacted to better understand their product development roadmap and benchmark their current and future capabilities.
Finally, experts and customer representatives were brought together in a workshop to explore the most promising technologies, both now and in 3-5 years, for each of three personnel rescue scenarios.
Technology Highlights
- Approaches combining GNSS tracking with Wi-Fi, cellular and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) backups, illustrating the trend towards multi-mode devices that transition between positioning methods depending on the environment.
- A system that uses drone- or vehicle-mounted broadcast nodes to provide flexible location coverage in challenging environments, demonstrating how deployable infrastructure could extend tracking capability beyond fixed networks.
- Wearable tracking devices using motion sensors and magnetic field detection, enabling personnel positioning without GPS or network infrastructure.
The Value and Impact
The project delivered an actionable, decision-ready view of the personnel recovery technology landscape, transforming a fragmented mix of products, research programmes, and emerging technologies into clear priorities and practical roadmaps tailored to different operational scenarios.
The customer gained clear confidence in which approaches were mature enough for near-term consideration, which warranted further investigation, and which represented longer-term opportunities. Critically, that confidence was grounded in structured engagement with carefully selected subject matter experts rather than literature reviews and supplier claims alone.
The engagement demonstrated a repeatable model for technology intelligence: rapid access to the right specialists can accelerate assessment, validate emerging evidence, and help R&D organisations move from uncertainty to informed, expert-backed decisions.