A bio-signal computing platform for real-time online health analytics for manned space missions

Monitoring the health and wellbeing of human beings during any manned spaceflight is a critical aspect of such missions. Moving beyond telemetry to ground stations with monitoring of the physiological data by physicians is critical to future manned space missions. Autonomous Medical Care has been identified by NASA as one of the top priority technologies to be developed for Mars missions, with seven Risk Categories with that area. In Mars missions issues that make this a priority include the transmission latency restricted bandwidth availability and the blackout periods due to the normal rotation of Mars when the lander would be on the far side of the planet relative to earth for roughly half of each Mars solar day. Two of the priority areas are Monitoring and Prevention, and Medical Informatics, Technologies and Support Systems. In this paper, the continuing development and evolution of a platform to address these priorities is presented with a focus on the capabilities of biomedical sensors to non-invasively measure critical biosignals, such as continuous blood pressure measurements. This platform has the capability, in addition to real-time diagnostics, to provide supervisory medical monitoring, modularity in deployment of specialized diagnostic algorithms and also the offline (earth-based) development and deployment of new algorithms based on additional mission needs. The platform and these capabilities are described, along with examples of its use.