Automated Behavior and Cohesion Assessment Tools, Phase I

An important consideration of long duration space flight operations is interpersonal dynamics. The crew will be working very closely for extended periods of time and the distance between the spacecraft and earth-bound flight surgeons will prevent real-time communication. Breakdown of morale or the psychology of crew may result in increased stress, conflict, erratic behaviors, reduced cohesion, and perhaps even rebellion. Flight surgeons have stated the need for unobtrusive monitoring to help detect if crews are having difficulties with coping with long duration spaceflight environments. NASA has tens of thousands of procedures for the space shuttle and ISS, and the new Constellation vehicles will also have thousands of procedures. These procedures, and the training in performing them, represent the models and data necessary to build a behavioral assessment tool. Currently procedures are authored in Word. Under this paradigm, developing behavioral models of crew procedure performance would require re-coding all procedures by hand. However, the Constellation program is planning to use an XML representation of procedures, which facilitates automatic translation. Nominal performance metrics can determined during training and then compared during the actual missions. Deviations between the nominal and current performance can be flagged for additional attention. Since crew members can perform upwards of hundreds of procedures a week, there will be substantial data with which to assess crew behavioral performance The long-term goal of this project is to develop a set of applied technologies that can monitor crew health and cohesiveness in an unobtrusive manner and identify potential abnormalities for feedback to astronauts and flight surgeons for further investigation. The goal of the Phase I will be to develop a set of recommendations regarding technologies and techniques to accomplish the objectives and a conceptual design of a system that implement the recommendations

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.

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