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Active TRL 4 (started at 4, targeting 7)
Exploration missions will feature austere habitable environments, volume and mass constraints, limited to no resupply, and communication delays that will impose challenges to evaluating and maintaining crew health and performance. Due to increased exposure to the hazards of human space flight and the lack of evacuation capabilities, exploration missions will demand increasingly detailed coordination of medical care between crewmembers and care providers despite the decreasing availability of real-time communications. This asynchronous, Earth-independent mode of operation also necessitates one or more in-flight crew and ground support will have to assess, diagnose, and treat medical conditions that may arise in an efficient and effective manner.
Exploration missions will have constraints in mass, volume, power, consumables and resupply missions, leaving crew with the inability to return biological samples back to Earth for analysis. In the current low earth orbit (LEO) paradigm, most samples are obtained pre/post flight or down-massed for analysis. This will not be feasible for extended duration missions to the moon and Mars. This, combined with the need to operate with greater autonomy compared to a lunar or LEO mission, necessitate point-of-care medical diagnostic technology, specifically, a suite of in-situ lab analysis devices will be needed to manage medical conditions in real-time.
The objective of this project is to identify the lowest mass/volume solutions for an exploration lab suite capable of measuring high yield clinical analytes. Evaluations will include ground and in-flight testing of selected devices. In-flight testing of selected devices will evaluate their ability to operate in the microgravity environment, their measurement accuracy, and their usability.
Providing an in-situ lab analysis capability will enable both operational and research needs to minimize risk to overall crew health and performance and help to characterize and better understand how the effects of extended deep space environments affect the health and performance of crew. In-situ clinical lab analysis would enable screening, diagnosis, and monitoring of medical conditions without frequent resupply or sample return.
Development and testing of point-of-care lab analysis is also an interest area for the DoD and has applications for advancing global and remote healthcare. Point-of-care lab analysis is also of interest in terrestrial areas that are remote with limited access to healthcare resources (i.e. polar medicine, developing nations).
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