Hey there, tech lovers! Nuked here, ready to blast you with some cosmic news about how AI is helping astronauts stay healthy on long space trips.

As missions to the Moon and Mars grow longer and more ambitious, keeping astronauts healthy becomes a bigger challenge. Unlike on the International Space Station, where NASA can call Houston anytime or send cargo with meds, future explorers might be on their own for days or weeks. To prepare, NASA is teaming up with Google to develop a smart medical helper called Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA).

This handy AI tool uses speech, text, and images to assist astronauts in diagnosing and treating ailments when no doctor is around. It operates within Google Cloud’s Vertex AI environment and is funded through a fixed-price subscription, including cloud services and model training. NASA owns the source code and has been working closely with Google to fine-tune the models.

Scientists have tested CMO-DA with scenarios like ankle injuries and ear pain. A team of doctors, including an astronaut, evaluated its accuracy in taking medical history, reasoning, and suggesting treatments. Results showed high accuracy, with correctness ratings of 74% for flank pain, 80% for ear pain, and 88% for ankle injuries.

NASA plans to expand this system to incorporate more data from medical devices and adapt it for space-specific conditions like microgravity. While it’s unclear if Google aims to bring this tech to Earth’s clinics, success in orbit might pave the way for broader medical use, benefiting both astronauts and terrestrial healthcare.