Real-time online health analytics for interplanetary space missions

Monitoring the health and well-being of human beings during any manned spaceflight is a critical aspect of the space mission. To date this has been done almost exclusively with telemetry to ground stations and monitoring of the physiological data by physicians. With lunar and Mars missions the transmission latency become problematic, and in additional to longer latency, Mars missions would also be subject to more restricted bandwidth availability and to 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. While these blackout period could be reduced or removed with relay satellite in Martian orbit, this may not be practical for early missions to Mars. As such, 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. Two of these are Monitoring and Prevention; and Medical Informatics, Technologies and Support Systems. In this paper, the Artemis platform, which was developed originally for real-time diagnostics in neonatal intensive care is presented as a solution to these areas of Autonomous Medical Care for Mars missions. 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. Furthermore, its requirements in terms of resources within the inherently limited resources of a long space mission are also presented and analysed, and a proposed physical architecture for both the space and ground control components are proposed.