As human-spaceflight missions extend and venture farther from Earth, maintaining crew health becomes increasingly challenging.
Astronauts on the International Space Station currently rely on real-time communication with Houston, regular medication deliveries, and a swift return to Earth after six months. However, these conditions may change as NASA and commercial entities like SpaceX aim to conduct longer missions to the moon and Mars.
Given this future, NASA is gradually advancing towards more “Earth-independent” on-orbit medical care. An early initiative is a proof-of-concept AI medical assistant being developed with Google, known as the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA). This tool aids astronauts in diagnosing and treating symptoms without a doctor or when communication to Earth is unavailable.
The multimodal tool integrates speech, text, and images and operates within Google Cloud’s Vertex AI environment.
According to David Cruley, customer engineer at Google’s Public Sector, the project runs under a fixed-price subscription agreement with Google Public Sector, covering cloud services, infrastructure, and model training costs. NASA retains ownership of the app’s source code and has contributed to model refinement. Google Vertex AI platform provides access to Google and third-party models.
CMO-DA has been tested in three scenarios: an ankle injury, flank pain, and ear pain. A team of three physicians, one being an astronaut, assessed the assistant’s performance in evaluation, history-taking, clinical reasoning, and treatment.
The team found notable diagnostic accuracy, rating the flank pain evaluation and treatment as 74% likely correct, ear pain at 80%, and 88% for the ankle injury.
The development roadmap is deliberately incremental. NASA scientists noted in a slide deck that they plan to incorporate more data sources, such as medical devices, and enhance the model’s “situational awareness” to address conditions specific to space medicine, like microgravity.
Cruley mentioned that while Google has not explicitly stated intentions to seek regulatory clearance for this medical assistant in terrestrial doctor’s offices, it could be a logical progression if validated in space.
The tool aims to enhance astronaut health in space and could also offer insights applicable to other health areas.