rHealth One Flight Demonstration

For current spaceflight missions, NASA has the ability to return blood and urine samples to the ground for testing and evaluation. For long duration space missions, it will not be possible for ground testing of these flight samples. There is a need to evaluate if Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) medical devices, which can assay biologic fluids, function correctly in microgravity. The rHEALTH ONE platform will be certified for flight using the JPD 7120.9 Experimental Flight Hardware (Class 1-E) Development Process. Vendor will perform minor modifications to the device to conform to flight certification requirements. The flight device will demonstrate flow cytometry – particle counts, intensity, measurements of immunoassay markers with control samples that are representative of blood cells. Those flight measurements will be compared to ground measurements taken utilizing the same batched control samples. The on-orbit demonstration will show that the rHEALTH ONE operates nominally in the microgravity environment.

This technology is currently in development. When additional publically releasable information becomes available, it will be posted on TechPort.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 5) — 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.

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