A Virtual Social Support System for Long-Duration Space Exploration Missions

Our overall goal is to enhance the overall behavior health and performance of personnel on (future potential) long-duration missions. We propose to use a local representation of the Second Life virtual world, along with our computer graphics and artificial intelligence background, to make a highly interactive and responsive environment between groups of people that are literally worlds apart in communication distance. By having the interactions occur this way, there is no communication latency that needs to be dealt with, because content is updated asynchronously. We will also leverage and adapt our Automated Behavior and Cohesion Assessment Tools system, previously developed under a recent NASA Phase II SBIR, to measure behavior health and performance.

This technology could be applied to all current and future NASA missions. While it is being developed for application to long duration space flight operations, the techniques are amenable to application in shorter duration flight operations as well, such as related to the International Space Station and Space Shuttle. This is particularly true with respect to behavioral and psychological health (whereas crew cohesiveness is anticipated to be less of an issue as duration decreases). This behavioral modeling technology could also be applied to NASA's Aerospace activities. For example, it could be used to measure stress on air traffic controllers. Adaptation to commercial airlines, in which the standardized procedures and repetitive nature of their execution within the close confines of an aircraft facilitates the modeling and establishment of norms for the behavior for individual crew.

The military has teams of individuals working in high stress environments over long durations. Examples include submarine crews, aircraft carriers, embedded special operations forces and pilots flying unmanned air vehicles for hours on end. We expect this same technology to transfer to military applications, since even a lag of one minute makes most real time interactions impossible, and this technique would allow are more interactive communication where none was possible before (ex: on a submarine). A variety of commercial activities also have similar characteristics to NASA missions, and the ABCAT software has commercial potential here. As mentioned, air traffic controllers work in high-stress environment where small mistakes can be costly. Likewise, teams of operators control nuclear power plants, petrochemical plants, oil refineries, etc. They often perform standard operating procedures and need to be monitored closely for degraded performance. Even in situations in which lives or property are not at risk, monitoring and detecting problems with individual and team performance is useful for managers interested in achieving peak performance.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 6) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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.