The 131st is situated at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California. This individual is also a “Warrior In Residence” at the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which is overseeing the contract with Sontius. In 2015, the U.S. military opened this office, which is also in Mountain View, to facilitate more active engagement with private companies developing novel technologies with possible military applications.

“The ability to communicate by radio is crucial for our mission,” an unnamed pararescueman from the California Air National Guard’s 131st Rescue Squadron said in an official press release on Sept. 11, 2018. “It enables us to execute in extreme conditions and save lives. But despite having amazing technology, communication still commonly breaks down because of the extreme environments where we operate.”

Though it sounds like a gadget you might find in a spy thriller or a superhero movie, the product from California-headquartered Sonitus Technologies is very real and works using well-established science. Defense One was first to get the details about the latest developments of the system, which members of the Air National Guard have already taken to Afghanistan and used during the response to 2017’s Hurricane Harvey along the United States’ Gulf Coast .

The days of the iconic image of plainclothes law enforcement , military , and intelligence personnel wearing a small speaker in one ear and talking discreetly into a microphone in the cuff of their shirt may be coming to an end. The U.S. military has handed a small tech company a contract worth approximately $10 million dollars for tiny combination microphone-and-speakers that clip onto the back of your teeth and use vibrations to transmit sounds right into your head.

Sonitus’ system, nicknamed the Molar Mic, helps address many issues units such as the 131st have with their existing communications gear. It completely eliminates the need for headsets or earbuds, head-mounted microphones, and the wires that link all of that together with a larger radio. Instead, an operator with the Molar Mic simply clips that tiny system into the back of last upper molar on one side of their mouth and that’s it. You can speak as normal, even in a whisper, and the built-in microphone will pick it up. When messages come in, the system translates them into vibrations on your teeth, which then reverberate inside your head and into your inner ear. Though the wonders of biology, your own body is able to process all this and turn it back into understandable sounds. The company actually derived the system from a hearing aid that it had developed using the same principle. “Over the period of three weeks, your brain adapts and it enhances your ability to process the audio,” Sontius’ CEO Peter Hadrovic told Defense One. But “out of the gate, you can understand it.”

Sonitus A series of images showing Sontius' original Medical Soundbite hearing aid and how a user would insert it. This system is very similar to the Molar Mic.

The Molar Mic is similar in some conceptual respects to throat microphones, which use the vibration of your throat rather than your actual spoken voice. This technology dates back to before World War II and remains in common use today, but only works for outgoing transmissions, not incoming ones. By sticking the microphone-and-speaker inside the mouth, Sonitus’ system also has the ability to pick up someone talking even with a cacophony of sounds around them, such as the spinning blades of a helicopter or the rushing air as someone parachutes out of an airplane, and also effectively cancels out much of that same background noise. The Molar Mic still requires a normal radio to work and connects directly to a low-profile receiver the user wears around their via a wireless Near-Field Magnetic Induction (NFMI) link, similar to how Bluetooth devices link up with your smartphone. NFMI allows for encryption and can work underwater. A second wireless or wired connection then transmits the information to and from the radio or radios, which work as they would if they were connected to any other combination of microphone and speaker. There are also no external components on the head that can get damaged or knocked off.

Sonitus A notional breakdown of how a military operator might employ the Molar Mic together with other more typical communications gear.

What this then means is that an individual can rapidly change headgear – imagine as U.S. Navy SEAL switching from a diving mask to a combat helmet or soft hat after swimming ashore on a covert mission – without any loss communications connectivity. There is also no need for head-mounted items at all, or to speak into discreet directly into a microphone under your clothes. A person passing by an individual wearing the Molar Mic on a covert or clandestine mission might just assume that they were talking quietly to themselves. With that latter scenario in mind, it’s not surprising that Sonitus received some of its earliest funding from In-Q-Tel, a Central Intelligence Agency-funded non-profit venture capital firm that seeks out new technologies for the U.S. Intelligence Community. Since 1999, it has invested in dozens of companies, most notably Keyhole, Inc ., which became Google Earth in 2006.

USAF A US Air Force pararescueman assigned to the 83rd Expeditionary Rescue Squadron in Afghanistan speaks through a more traditional microphone headset, giving a good sense of how bulky and complicated existing communications gear is.