As human missions stretch beyond low-Earth orbit, keeping astronauts healthy gets harder. On the ISS, crews can phone Houston in real time, receive regular medication deliveries, and return to Earth after roughly six months. Moon and Mars missions won’t have those luxuries—communications may lag or drop out, resupply is scarce, and evacuation is impractical—so NASA is pushing toward more “Earth-independent” care.

One of its first steps: a proof-of-concept AI medical assistant built with Google. Called the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), the tool is designed to help astronauts assess symptoms and administer treatment when no doctor is available or contact with Earth is limited. It’s multimodal—handling speech, text, and images—and runs inside Google Cloud’s Vertex AI environment.

The project operates under a fixed-price Google Public Sector subscription that covers cloud services, app-development infrastructure, and model training. NASA owns the app’s source code and has helped fine-tune the models, while Vertex AI provides access to Google’s own models and select third-party options.

Early trials put CMO-DA through three scenarios—ankle injury, flank pain, and ear pain—then had three physicians (including an astronaut) grade its initial evaluation, history-taking, clinical reasoning, and treatment plan. The reviewers judged the assistant’s likely diagnostic correctness at 88% for the ankle injury, 80% for ear pain, and 74% for flank pain.

The roadmap is intentionally incremental. NASA plans to feed in more data sources (like readings from onboard medical devices) and train the system to be “situationally aware” of space-specific factors such as microgravity.

Whether Google will seek regulatory clearance for use in terrestrial clinics remains an open question, though it’s a logical next step if on-orbit validation goes well. Beyond safeguarding astronauts, the partners say lessons from CMO-DA could translate to broader healthcare applications on Earth.

Source