18th IAA Humans in Space Symposium (2011)
2165.pdf
Distributed System for Spaceflight Biomedical Support
Gary E. Strangman,1 Rob R. Montgomery,2 and Ian M. D. Jamieson3
1
Harvard Medical School / Massachusetts General Hospital, Psychiatry, Charlestown, MA,
strang@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu; 2 Argosy Omnimedia, Rockville, MD, rob.montgomery@argoc.com;
3
Harvard Medical School / Massachusetts General Hospital, Psychiatry, Charlestown, MA;
ianj@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu.
INTRODUCTION
Biomedical monitoring and countermeasure delivery are essential components of any manned spaceflight.
However, most current spaceflight medical devices are designed as stand-alone systems, unable to integrate with
other devices, synchronize data streams, be easily augmented with new sensors, or incorporate countermeasure or
therapy delivery capabilities 1. This lack of integration hinders timely medical evaluation and treatment. While
multi-parameter monitoring devices are being developed, these too are designed to be stand-alone systems. The
stand-alone problem even extends to existing therapeutic systems, including those supporting drug delivery, just-intime training software, cardiac defibrillation, and respiration. We seek to develop SpaceMed, a distributed platform
for in-flight monitoring, control and decision support, to which a broad range of existing and future biomedical
devices, systems and software will be able to connect and interact.
METHODS
The SpaceMed platform is being designed around four basic components. Hardware components typically
implement the key medical functionality (pulse oximeters, ultrasound, etc), whereas the remainder of the system is
software based. The interface layer will support various communication protocols to enable different types of
hardware components to communicate with the SpaceMed platform. The middleware layer will provide a
publish/subscribe model for standards-based and distributed access to all potential types of medical data. Finally, the
graphical user interface (GUI) will provide secure, flexible, and high performance graphical visualization and
system control capabilities.
RESULTS
For hardware, several wireless devices for physiological and environmental monitoring have been assembled into a
wireless sensor network (WSN), including electrocardiography, galvanic skin response, triaxial accelerometry, a
triaxial gyroscope, temperature, and carbon dioxide sensors. Work is underway to build the interface layer, which
will communicate with an established middleware layer. The real-time GUI is currently in the design stage.
DISCUSSION
When complete, this system will provide a single platform to which both existing and future medical devices can
inter-operate with goals of standards conformity, security, privacy, and high quality of service. The overall design
will enable automatic time-synchronization of data streams, minimizes and balances network communication loads,
and will be based on open source software.
REFERENCES
1.
Bogomolov VV et al. In: Nicogossian AE, Mohler SR, Gazenko OG, Grigoriev AI, eds. Space Biology and
Medicine. Vol V. Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronatuics and Astronautics; 2009:331-394.