With NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX looking forward to human missions to Mars, medical care in space is a matter that cannot be overlooked. For this, NASA and Google are working together to create a Clinical Decision Support System for astronauts called Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA). By utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), the CMO-DA provides medical care to astronauts during extended missions such as those taking them to Mars.
AI healthcare in space
The CMO-DA’s main focus is to fill the gap in healthcare during space exploration. According to Google, it would help diagnose illnesses and assist medical officers in treating astronauts by making decisions based on data and predictive analysis. By training its AI system on spaceflight literature, it uses “cutting-edge natural language processing and machine learning techniques to safely provide real-time analyses of crew health and performance”.
For now, the CMO-DA has been tested with various medical scenarios. These tests were checked using the Objective Structured Clinical Examination framework, the same one that’s used to test out the clinical skills of medical students and healthcare professionals. Initial outcomes from the trials have shown that the tool is promising, as it has been able to analyze symptoms accurately. Of course, Google and NASA need to ensure that the tool will work as intended, so the next steps would be to bring in medical doctors to improve the current model.
Use in remote environments
While the CMO-DA is still in development and won’t be experiencing any space missions anytime soon, the project will be tested out here on Earth. According to Google, the tool benefits both space exploration and “people here on Earth by providing early access to quality medical care in remote areas.” For NASA and Google, the technology is an important milestone when it comes to AI-assisted medical care.
Photo credit: The feature image is symbolic and has been taken by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope.
