National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Small Business Innovation Research 2001 Program Solicitation

CHAPTER 8.2.1

[ back to Solicitation ] [ to Chapter 8.2 ] [ to Chapter 8 ] [ back to table of contents ]

8.2.1 Human Operations in Space: Intelligent Medical Systems
NASA Installation: Johnson Space Center (JSC)

The Center of Excellence for Human Operations in Space seeks to expand the human experience into the far reaches of space through exploring, using, and enabling the development of space. Within these goals, the practice of medicine in space is confounded by severe restrictions on vehicle and personnel resources. Current medical operations concepts rely on non-physician astronauts with minimal medical experience who are supported by extensive communications with Earth-based medical personnel. As we move to longer duration missions further from Earth or involve more dangerous activities such as significant "hard hat" construction activities in space, the need for more autonomous emergency medical care becomes acute. A human Mars mission, for example, would take a multicultural crew of 4 to 6 people on a 6 to 8 month journey to the red planet. Upon arriving, the crew can expect to stay about 1.5 years on the surface before returning. Communication delays of up to 40 minutes round trip make emergency support from the ground an impossibility. Additionally, many medical emergencies normally require a team of doctors, nurses and other specialty medical professionals such as laboratory technicians, pharmacists, radiologists, and pathologists. Instead, a relatively small crew with specialties in electrical and mechanical engineering, astrobiology, geology, and other mission critical skills but little training and practice in emergency medical response will have to handle medical emergencies of all sorts under extremely stressful conditions. Clearly, intelligent medical systems will have to be devised to support these efforts and will have to become physician-equivalent helpers in the event of critical emergencies.

A variety of technologies are required including but not limited to:

• Visual programming shells/interfaces that allow physicians and other medical experts to easily capture their knowledge for diagnostic aids, decision support tools, medical protocol control, multimedia training tools, and other support systems.
• Methods of coordinating the activities of teams, such as control through RF linked palmtop computers or other means, to ensure adequate emergency medical response.
• Methods for rapidly entering medical records and comparison with existing records for rapid diagnostic support, allowing more natural and easier ways of interacting with or accessing medical knowledge in the context of real data.
• Medical data visualization techniques that provide large quantities of complex data in easy to understand and manipulate forms, allowing questions about the data to be easily and intuitively investigated in an interactive fashion.
• The use of physiological simulation models to aid in protocol and procedure development for emergency medical response.
• The use of detailed physiological models of individual patients in decision support to allow prediction of the effect of treatments or the administration of pharmaceuticals for guiding protocol selection in particular cases.
• On-the-spot tools for providing decision support and "just-in-time" training to allow relatively unskilled individuals to perform emergency treatment that they would not otherwise be capable of performing.
• Basic tools for creating intelligent, tutoring applications that can be used to insert medical training into long term missions, especially those that use a multimedia case study approach.
• Novel automated means for delivering various aspects of emergency medical care to free up crew members to take on other tasks.
  

[ back to Solicitation ] [ to Chapter 8.2 ] [ to Chapter 8 ] [ back to table of contents ]