NASA and Google are building AI medical assistants to keep Mars-bound astronauts healthy

As human space missions grow longer and travel farther from Earth, it becomes more difficult to keep your crew healthy.

International Space Station astronauts can rely on real-time calls to Houston, regular cargo delivery of medicines, and returning home six months later. Like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, NASA and its commercial partners appear to carry out longer-term missions that take humans to the Moon and Mars, so this could change quickly.

That looming reality is urging NASA to gradually make it more “earth-independent” for orbital healthcare. One of the early experiments was the proof-of-concept AI medical assistant. A tool called Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA) is designed to help astronauts diagnose and treat symptoms when doctors are not available or when communications to Earth become dark.

Multimodal tools that include audio, text and images run within Google Cloud’s Vertex AI environment.

The project operates under a fixed price Google Public Sector Subscription agreement with David Cruley, a customer engineer at Google’s Public Sector Business Unit, which includes the costs of cloud services, application development infrastructure and model training. NASA owns the source code for its apps and helps with fine-tuning the model. The Google Vertex AI platform provides access to Google and other third-party models.

The two tissues placed three scenarios in CMO-DA: ankle injuries, flank pain, and ear pain. The trio of astronauts evaluated the assistant’s performance in initial assessments, history acquisition, clinical reasoning and treatment.

The trio determined that flank pain assessment and treatment plan were 74% correct, and found high diagnostic accuracy. Ear pain, 80%; ankle damage 88%.

The roadmap is intentionally incremental. NASA scientists said they plan to add data sources like medical devices on the slide deck and train the model to be “situated” in order to “situated.”

Cruley was vague about whether Google intends to pursue regulatory clearance to bring this type of medical assistant to the office of a doctor on earth, but it could be a clear next step if the model is being verified in orbit.

Not only can the tool improve the health of space astronauts, but “the lessons learned from this tool could also be applicable to other health areas,” he said.