Circadian-Targeted Lighting to Reduce Fatigue-Driven Errors in 24/7 Naval Operations: Circadian Positioning Systems

The Problem

Fatigue remains one of the most persistent and least addressed threats to Warfighter safety and performance across the Fleet. In 2017, the collisions of USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain killed seventeen sailors, with investigators citing fatigue among the contributing factors. The Government Accountability Office has since documented the same underlying failure repeatedly, first across the surface fleet, and most recently across the entire Department of Defense, finding that service members routinely fall short of their own services’ sleep requirements and that no scalable solution has been fielded to close that gap. Behind these findings are sailors who leave their families for months at a time, missing births, holidays, and everything in between, to stand watch on some of the most demanding jobs in the military. They should be able to focus on the mission in front of them rather than fight their own biology to do it. Left unsolved, this problem will continue to degrade judgment, slow reaction times, and put crews and missions at risk.

Project Highlight

Circadian Positioning Systems (CPS) develops circadian-targeted lighting and sensing technology that mitigates fatigue-driven errors among military personnel operating around the clock. The platform delivers precision “light recipes” timed not to the clock but to each sailor’s individual circadian phase, using vetted algorithms to determine exactly when and what type of light will shift biology and align alertness and sleep with the operational schedule. What differentiates this approach is its personalization: rather than treating the watch schedule as fixed and hoping crews adapt to it, CPS adapts the light environment to each sailor’s biological clock. Since its initial Navy contracts following the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions, CPS has advanced from research and development into operational validation, integrating and assessing its adapted commercial-off-the-shelf system aboard an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer during an 11-month deployment, one of the longest Navy deployments since Vietnam.

Impact & the Role of MTEC

If successful, this work will improve Warfighter readiness by reducing the fatigue that has been cited as a contributing factor in multiple serious naval incidents, including the 2017 Fitzgerald and McCain collisions and the 2025 USS Harry S. Truman incident. Better-rested, circadian-aligned crews make better decisions under pressure, resulting in fewer preventable casualties and reduced costs from accidents and medical attrition across the Fleet. Through Award No. MTEC-23-05-NMT-003, MTEC provided critical support in bridging the gap between research and operational validation, enabling CPS to integrate and assess its technology in a real-world deployed environment and accelerating its path toward scaling across the Navy and the broader Department of Defense.