Augmented Reality to Enhance Crew Medical Training Project

Completed

Description

Due to the large and diverse set of possible medical conditions, crew medical training focuses on the most likely medical scenarios that may occur in the current mission profiles, with less emphasis on rarer, or unforeseen health related events. The need for good training and the access to large amounts of documentation areconditions making the use of Augmented Reality (AR) techniques most promising. One of NASA's strategic goals is to extend and sustain human activities across the solar system. With time delays and potentially sparse communications back to Earth, astronauts may have to perform life-saving surgery without support from the Earth based flight control team. Medical crew training is a complex and labor-intensive process. Due to the large and diverse set of possible medical conditions, crew medical training focuses on the most likely medical scenarios that may occur in the current mission profiles, with less emphasis on rarer, or unforeseen health related events. The need for good training and the access to large amounts of documentation areconditions making the use of Augmented Reality (AR) techniques most promising. Also, the use of medical AR for crew training could enhance effectiveness, and expand the repertoire of available on-mission aids while minimizing resource utilization saving time, money and potentially improving outcomes.

Benefits

The ISS Program is striving to minimize crew time spent on maintenance tasks to increase time for science and operating payloads. This project supports that goal by making complex medical tests or emergency procedures easier to perform by the crew. Since the use of electronic procedures for onboard medical procedures is pervasive across multiple domains, other potential AR medical applications will continually be identified for current or future space hardware including ISS Robonaut 2 (ISS-R2). The medical AR technology can be applied to multiple industries, provided that the domain knowledge captured is well adapted to the targeted users. As our focus is the Human Spaceflight domain, and specifically the on board procedure domain, this project can directly benefit other commercial space participants. The concept can also be applied to other government agencies such as the DoD, to develop specialized assistants to the soldier of the future. The smart assistant would enable the users to obtain the critical information needed at the right time, cutting through the clutter of possible similar, but not interesting, pieces of data. Outside of aerospace and military domains there is also a significant opportunity for use of this technology in telemedicine, rural health and emergency responder applications

Details

Technology area	Human Health, Life Support, and Habitation Systems > Human Health and Performance > Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis
Program	Center Innovation Fund: JSC CIF (JSC CIF)
Lead organization	Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX
Start date	2012-01-01
End date	2012-04-01

Project contacts

Listed on TechPort itself — the most direct way to ask about this specific project.

Lui Wang — lui.wang-1@nasa.gov

How to get involved

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.