Developing requirements on a PHM-based technology to enable autonomous healthcare on space missions

Abstract

As space exploration community looks toward crewed space exploration missions beyond low-Earth orbit, the following two key distinctions from all manned space missions to date should be emphasized: first, crew will spend significantly longer periods of time with farther from reliable logistics depots, and second, early return or mission abort are not feasible options. So designing requirements on, developing and validating new technologies to enable autonomous healthcare are critical to space mission success and safety. Since emergency quick-return option is not feasible for such missions, high reliability and crew autonomy will become increasingly dominant design drivers in order to sustain crew health and performance. Elaborating the issues and challenges on developing biomedical informatics technologies with predictive diagnostics capability for astronauts this paper focuses on designing requirements in order to develop an integrated PHM-based biomedical informatics technology that enables autonomous healthcare on manned space exploration missions. Such mature technology should be based on increased self-sufficiency and integrated systems that employ autonomous monitoring and control. A properly collected and structured Crew's Electronic Health Records (CEHR) coupled with a PHM-based predictive diagnostics capability could be a key component of the technology. The predictive diagnostics capability is based on autonomous crew health monitoring and maintenance that increases the crew performance reliability and eliminates a “surprise” factor. Predictive diagnostics is built on the powerful foundation of predictive analytics, so whereas predictive analytics indicates what is going to fail, predictive diagnostics also indicates both root and contributing causes of, or factors leading to an impending failure, as well as a priority of the failure. Building additional healthcare test objectives into the research priorities on the International Space Station (ISS) program in order to refine requirements on, develop and validate the technology with PHM-based predictive capability should help to fulfill the role of the ISS as the only testbed for BEO missions and an exploration enabling research platform.