NASA & Google Develop AI Medical Assistant for Deep-Space Missions

The system, named Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), is intended to help diagnose and treat symptoms autonomously.

In a major development, NASA is collaborating with Google to develop an AI-powered medical assistant to support astronauts on extended space missions where onboard doctors are unavailable and communication with Earth is limited.

The system, named Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), is intended to help diagnose and treat symptoms autonomously.

As per reports, CMO-DA uses a multimodal interface with speech, text and image inputs, operating within Google Cloud’s Vertex AI environment.

Further, the tool is powered by Google AI trained on spaceflight literature and is designed to provide real-time analysis of crew health and performance. NASA retains ownership of the source code and is directly involved in model refinement.

The project has been tested through three simulated medical scenarios, ankle injury, ear pain and flank pain, with diagnostic accuracies of 88%, 80% and 74% respectively. According to a TechCrunch report, the evaluation was conducted by a panel that included physicians and an astronaut, using a framework typically applied to assess medical students.

“Early results showed promise for reliable diagnoses based on reported symptoms,” according to a blog post on the project. Google and NASA are now working with medical doctors to further test and refine the model to enhance autonomous crew health and performance during future missions.

The development plan is incremental, with future updates expected to incorporate real-time data from onboard medical devices and account for conditions specific to space, such as the effects of microgravity on the human body.

The AI assistant is being developed under a fixed contract with Google Public Sector, covering cloud computing, application development infrastructure and model training. The Vertex AI platform integrates models from both Google and third-party providers.

Officials noted that while the immediate aim is to support astronauts during missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond, the technology could also be applied to improve healthcare in remote or underserved regions on Earth.

NASA has previously worked on other AI-based projects, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Dynamic Targeting system, which allows satellites to autonomously select imaging targets in under 90 seconds without human input.

Stay tuned for more such updates on Digital Health News