The Army is now “pre-piloting” apps and dashboards for its popular holistic health system, and leaders are facing tough decisions about what performance data to show soldiers and leaders to motivate them without overwhelming them or turning information into noise.
Holistic Health and Fitness, or H2F, launched as a pilot in 2018, aiming to equip combat brigades with specialized equipment and staff, including dietitians, occupational therapists and athletic trainers, to boost troops’ fitness, increase injury prevention, and promote overall warfighter health. The program proved so successful that in 2024 the Army announced it planned to eventually roll H2F out to all soldiers.
Part of that effort is the fielding of a “software solution” called the H2F Management System that is designed to provide soldiers, leaders and human performance staff with “data-driven insights that are typically only found within Special Operations or professional athletics,” according to an Army release from last December.
But as that fielding begins, leaders must decide what data — and how much — to display, said Command Sgt. Maj. Alex Kupratty, senior enlisted leader of Army Transformation and Training Command.
Speaking at an event hosted by the Military Officers Association of America this month, Kupratty said he was concerned about troops getting bogged down in “data fatigue” as the dashboards come online. He suggested that presenting raw data alone might not be most useful.
“I will tell you, I wear a Whoop. I wear an Oura Ring, and I tell you I probably look at half of the data that it provides me daily, and that’s being very generous,” Kupretty said. “But if I was to focus on things — when you start looking at return on investment, I would say physical readiness. Are we more resilient? Are we ready to fight and win our nation’s wars?”
Data driving injury prevention and recovery, he said, was the second-highest priority.
Tyler Christiansen, a senior operations manager with General Dynamics Information Technology, which is supporting the H2F Management System, said he believed input from Army commanders would help shape how data was presented.
“You need to go to command and say, ‘OK, what is important to you?’ And then from there, you start to work your way down to, OK, we can capture … all the way down to the lowest level,” he said. “At the lowest level, you know, it may be [heart rate variability], it may be tracking the sleep, it may be tracking the tonnage on a workout program, or what the diet plan is, and things like that. Absolutely, those things matter. But I think that you need to convey the data points up to command to show things like [return on investment] to show that you know the bean counters that sit way up top of why this is important.”
Christiansen didn’t say whether the new dashboards would ultimately crunch the data to create custom metrics for optimum readiness, prevention and recovery. It’s still early in rollout. The Army hasn’t announced a target date to have the new management system fielded, but officials said in December they expect to have 129 active-duty brigades, four states within the Army National Guard and two Army Reserve commands equipped with H2F performance teams by fiscal year 2029.
But leaders of the effort said they’re aware that how they present information will determine whether or not soldiers buy in. Jonathan Flynn, the H2F program director with the 199th Infantry Brigade, said he had recently spent two days at Fort Benning, Georgia, evaluating three different styles of apps that soldiers might soon use.
“I need the soldier to want to use this management system so we can get the data that that organization wants to collect,” he said. “Because in the past we’ve tried it, we tried it at [the 75th Ranger] Regiment, we’ve tried it at other organizations. They failed because we got to get the end user buy-in to wanting to use it. So regardless of what comes up, what we decide to collect and what we decide to use, what metrics to use, at the end of the day, we’ve got to get that end user soldier to want to log into it.”
It’s not clear what specific wearables or data collection experiment Flinn referenced, although the 75th Ranger Regiment has been a destination for many human performance improvement efforts, including those that used wearables to track heat injury risk and broader soldier performance.
In the second quarter of Fiscal Year 2027, another pilot effort will address the app and end-user experience, Flinn said.
“So that’s where I think our focus needs to be right now, and then we can figure out [heart rate variability] versus Whoop … those kinds of things,” he said. “We can figure that out at the end, but we have just got to get them wanting to log that data.”
