Keeping crew health becomes more difficult as human spaceflight missions get longer and travel further from Earth. Presently, astronauts on the International Space Station depend on direct contact with Houston without an AI medical assistant, ongoing medical supplies deliveries, and the choice to return home quickly after a six-month term. But this scenario could change shortly as NASA, working with commercial partners like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, gets ready for longer flights intended to send people to Mars and the Moon.
This approaching reality is motivating NASA to gradually improve on-orbit medical care to be more independent from Earth. An AI medical assistant under development with Google is among the first investigations along this line. Designed to help astronauts diagnose and treat medical symptoms in cases where a doctor is absent or communication with Earth is cut off, this revolutionary tool is known as the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA).
This AI medical assistant is working under the framework of Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, the CMO-DA is a multimodal tool that combines speech, text, and images. Under a fixed-price subscription with Google Public Sector, which covers expenses for cloud services, infrastructure for application development, and model training, the project is being carried out, according to David Cruley, a customer engineer in Google’s Public Sector division.
NASA owns the app’s source code and has helped to improve the AI medical assistant models. Models created by Google and other outside sources are available via the Google Vertex AI platform. CMO-DA has faced three different scenarios from the partnership: ear pain, flank pain, and an ankle injury. Based on the first assessment, history-taking, clinical judgement, and treatment recommendations, a group of three doctors, one of them an astronaut, assessed the performance of the assistant.
The evaluation showed a high level of diagnostic accuracy; the treatment strategy for flank discomfort was considered 74% likely to be correct; ear pain, 80%; and ankle damage, 88%. So, the $29 Billion Stock Award given by the Tesla Board is still in Elon Musk’s favor.