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

As Hom-Spaceflight missions grow longer and travel farther from the ground, keeping crews healthy becomes more difficult.

Astronauts on the International Space Station may depend on real -time calls to Houston, regular loading deliveries of drugs and a fast ride home after six months. All of this may soon change, as NASA and its trading partners, like Elon Musk’s Spacex, look like longer lasting missions that would lead people to the Moon and Mars.

This next reality drives NASA gradually making on-orbit medical care more “independent of the Earth.” One early experiment is a proof-concept AI medical assistant, which the agency builds with Google. The tool, called Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), is designed to help astronauts diagnose and treat symptoms when no doctor is available or communications to the Earth are blackened.

The multi-modal tool, which includes speech, text and images, works in Google Cloud’s vertex environment.

The project runs under fixed-price Google Public Sector Subscription Agreement, which includes the cost for cloud services, the application development infrastructure and model training, David Croley, a client engineer at Google’s public sector, told Techcrunch. NASA owns the source code to the app and helped set the models. The Google Vertex AI platform provides access to Google models and other third parties.

The two organizations put CMO-da through three scenarios: ankle injury, side pain and ear pain. A trio of doctors, one being an astronaut, graduated the work of the assistant through the initial assessment, history-taking, clinical reasoning and treatment.

The tripod found a high degree of diagnostic accuracy, judging the side pain -assessment and treatment plan to be 74% probably correct; ear pain, 80%; and 88% for the ankle wound.

The road is intentionally increasing. NASA -Scientists said in slide deck About the effort they plan to add more data sources, such as medical devices, and train the model to be “situationally aware”-this is, paying attention to spatial medical specific conditions such as microgravity.

Cruey has been vague about whether Google intends to pursue a regulatory right to take this type of medical assistant into doctors here on Earth, but it might be an obvious next step if the model is valid on orbit.

The tool could not only improve the health of astronauts in space, “but the lessons learned from this tool could also have applicability to other health health,” he said.