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Completed TRL 3 (started at 2, targeting 3)
To improve crew health and performance during future NASA human space exploration missions, a more effective countermeasure to motion sickness must be developed. Most astronauts experience motion sickness upon transitioning to a microgravity environment from Earth (coined ‘space motion sickness), and upon returned to Earth following extended exposure to microgravity. Additionally, any future use of artificial gravity in spaceflight is also expected to induce motion sickness. This research effort seeks to develop a new, non-invasive technology which leverages galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) in conjunction with sensory conflict theory to provide a countermeasure to motion sickness in astronauts transitioning between various gravity environments. Recently, GVS has been examined as a countermeasure for simulator sickness; providing absent vestibular cues when in a virtual environment has been shown to alleviate motion sickness symptoms. This effort will develop a GVS device which can predictively augment an astronaut’s vestibular cues based on their head movements and the specific gravity environments they are transitioning between. Furthermore, various high-level, disruptive GVS waveform applications will be studied as well as noisy GVS, which has been considered by NASA as a technology acting as a countermeasure to astronaut sensorimotor impairment. To date, this technology is limited by not knowing the most effective electrical waveform and how the waveform should be actively applied when transitioning between gravity environments. This effort will seek to address these technological limitations while fulfilling a critical gap within NASA’s Technology Taxonomy TX06.3.2. For this planned technology to be implemented in the future, it must show its effectiveness as a countermeasure. We aim to achieve this through ground-based demonstrations. In part, these ground-based demonstrations will rely on inducing motion sickness via the sickness induced by centrifugation (SiC) procedure. The incidence, severity, and time course of motion sickness will be assessed with and without the developed countermeasure to increase its Technology Readiness Level (TRL). The development of this technology seeks to not only provide a more effective motion sickness countermeasure device but also to reduce the required doses of anti-motion sickness medications currently utilized by NASA, which induce negative side effects.
Accomplishing this task will eliminate the necessity for the extensive emperical processes used to characterize fatigue thus furthering the rapid development and implementation of new material systems and processes while establishing the foundation for fatigue-centric computational material design.
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