Funding Status:
Active - Currently funded and in progress
Procurement Mechanism(s):
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Aims:
The objective of this work is to develop, refine, and empirically
test a novel technology to optimize crewmembers physiological and mental
states via personalized manipulation of the surrounding work
environment. We will leverage our team’s engineering, behavioral and
human factors expertise, plus our previously developed hardware, to
produce a countermeasure (CM) platform that can mitigate adverse
cognitive and behavioral conditions that may arise during long-duration
spaceflight missions.
Aim 1: Perform a detailed risk assessment of factors that
contribute to personal and team dysfunction by conducting a detailed
literature survey to compile factors contributing to individual and team
dysfunction in ICE environments. We will align this list with current
methods for preventing or mitigating such issues via video-free
exposures and/or self-guided interventions.
Aim 2: Develop a personalized performance-optimization
platform (P-POP) based on closed loop/feedback that integrates
physiological sensing with augmentation of the astronaut’s local working
environment using audio, haptics, and light. We will leverage our
NINscan multi-modal physiological sensing system, currently supporting
NIRS, EEG, EMG, EOG, ECG, EDA, respiration, temperature, and motion.
This will be coupled to effectors for delivering personalized auditory,
haptic, and light augmentation of the local work environment via
closed-loop operation. P-POP will use such augmentations to modulate
attention, engagement, cognitive load, and alertness to optimize
performance.
Aim 3: Characterize the ability of P-POP to improve key
performance capabilities including attention, response time, memory,
cognitive control, and operationally relevant performance. Using
ongoing laboratory optimization and three experiments, we will quantify
performance changes associated with P-POP environmental manipulations
in both cognitive and operationally relevant tasks, using NASA’s
Cognition and our team’s ROBoT-r simulated robotics task, respectively.
Environmental manipulations will seek to maintain optimal attention,
engagement, cognitive load, and alertness, as assessed by
psychophysiological signatures.
Aim 4: Assess the feasibility, acceptability, and
efficacy of our proposed platform when used with individuals and teams
during long-duration spaceflight analogs. To evaluate P-POP under
spaceflight-relevant conditions we will deploy the platform in the HERA
analog facility with 16 astronaut-like participants. We will assess
P-POP’s feasibility and acceptability for both crew and mission
controllers, while performance will be evaluated both with and without
P-POP engagement, similar to Aim 3.