AbstractsMedical & Health Science

Introduction: In the near future space tourism will be a reality. The flights will be suborbital; hyper-gravity, microgravity, heavy vibrations and pressure differences will occur. The physiological effects on the suborbital tourist cannot be sufficiently predicted. All currently available baseline data were collected in a highly selected group of professional astronauts that do not represent the general population. Participants of commercial flights can be of any age and could have a number of medical conditions. To increase understanding on the reaction of non-astronauts to G-force a monitoring system is developed that collects vital health information. The system has two objectives. First, it must collect data for further research into the human tolerance to G-forces. Second, the system must enable constant monitoring of the state of the participant in real time during the flight. The goal of this research is to investigate how the vital functions of spaceflight participants can be monitored during a suborbital spaceflight. Method: First of all the research involved investigating which vital functions are important for participant health state estimation, Second, based on physiological requirements, techniques were selected for monitoring during a suborbital spaceflight. Third, the prototype was built incorporating both physiological en surroundings monitoring modules. Fourth and finally, the system was evaluated in a hypergravity environment on earth. Results: Two types of results were produced namely physiological results and operational results. The operational results focus on the monitoring concept and the improvements that could be made based on the development and test phase. The physiological results go into detail on the physiology of suborbital spaceflight. These findings determine if the system provides sufficient information to estimate the health state of the spaceflight participant. The vital health information or vital functions are cerebral oxygenation, blood oxygenation and heart function. The only suitable monitoring techniques in this research setting are Electrocardiography (ECG) and Pulse Oximetry (SPO2). Conclusion: The future suborbital spaceflight monitoring system should consist of a harness with an integrated ECG with a minimum of 3-leads, a pulse oximeter and a respiration meter. It should contain an integrated G-force sensor or be able to synchronize the system with an external G-force measurement. The system should be able to facilitate hardware and software modification. Due to the technical and practical limitations of the medical monitoring techniques only two techniques met the requirements for monitoring in space. Consequently, a certain health information gap exists. This research suggests that the future of monitoring spaceflight participants lies in collecting more heath monitoring data.