NASA and Google develop AI assistant to help astronauts going to Mars be healthy

Google

As human space missions extend further from Earth, ensuring crew health becomes increasingly complex. Unlike current International Space Station (ISS) missions, where astronauts rely on constant communication with ground-based medical teams, regular medicine resupplies, and a return option within six months, future missions to the Moon and Mars will require greater medical self-sufficiency.

To address this challenge, NASA is collaborating with Google to develop an AI-powered medical assistant designed to help astronauts diagnose and treat medical issues independently. The tool, named Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), aims to fill the gap when no doctor is available onboard and communication with Earth is limited or delayed.

CMO-DA uses a multimodal interface incorporating speech, text, and image inputs. It operates within Google Cloud’s Vertex AI environment, leveraging cloud-based infrastructure for application development and model training. NASA retains ownership of the app’s source code and has actively contributed to fine-tuning the AI models. The Google platform integrates AI models from both Google and third-party providers.

The project has undergone preliminary testing through three medical scenarios: ankle injury, flank pain, and ear pain. A panel including two physicians and one astronaut evaluated the assistant’s accuracy in initial assessment, history taking, clinical reasoning, and treatment planning. The assistant achieved diagnostic accuracies of 74% for flank pain, 80% for ear pain, and 88% for ankle injury, indicating promising potential for autonomous medical support.

NASA’s development plan is incremental. Future updates aim to integrate additional data sources, such as medical devices, and enhance the AI’s “situational awareness” to accommodate space-specific conditions like microgravity’s effects on the human body. This will allow the assistant to provide contextually relevant advice tailored to the unique challenges of space medicine.

David Cruley, a Google Public Sector engineer involved in the project, did not clarify whether Google plans to seek regulatory approval for deploying this AI assistant in terrestrial healthcare settings. However, success in space could pave the way for broader applications on Earth, potentially improving medical care in remote or underserved environments.

Beyond supporting astronauts’ health during deep-space missions, NASA and Google see this project as an opportunity to gather insights that could benefit wider medical fields. Lessons learned from CMO-DA’s development and deployment may inform the design of future AI medical tools, enhancing diagnostic accuracy and patient care worldwide.