Gadgetory

we're here in Boston at Brigham and Women's Hospital and we're about to get a crash course in how to deal with a medical emergency in space I'm terrified NASA astronauts go into space when they're at their peak physical ability but like the rest of us they can still get sick and when that happens it's not as if they can just drive to the hospital astronauts in low-earth orbit like those on the International Space Station still have constant contact with ground control if there's a medical emergency a flight surgeon can talk them through it and provide professional expertise astronauts flying to Mars won't have that luxury they'll need to solve emergencies on their own without much help from earth and that's why we've come to the Stratos Center it specializes in medical simulations from doctoring robotic dummies to using virtual reality to practice microscopic surgery Stratos received funding from NASA to build its own spacecraft sickbay where they run medical emergency simulations while astronauts are currently trained in basic medical procedures this program is focused on how teams should behave during a medical emergency on a deep-space mission and what it will take to work autonomously without constant support from ground control so what I love about this Center is that you know we're in a regular old hospital hallway and then we turn here and we're in space I have to hand it to y'all it looks like you ripped it straight out of a sci-fi movie hi thanks well we had we had a lot of input from experts from NASA and it's based on the Destiny module so it's the same kind of height and width so it feels compact just doesn't space weight is such an issue for launching so how did you decide what tools you at need you know what are some of the basics that you have to have a what is a huge concern and this even things like fluid so we use a lot of IV fluid in the hospital as so every to take fluids you probably do and so we've got like a basic cardiac MCAT a respiratory kit like a first aid kit that you would have with bandages and gauze and so on it's a low resource M health care environment so it's not a lot of equipment but it seems like you have a lot of different things that could be used for different purposes this has all of the medicine you'd need so this is like a medicine care that has some some key drugs for dealing with cardiac conditions as such as epinephrine it has European it has albuterol other other drugs and these this is actually what it really looks like right there in these little pouches so what would happen normally if you'd open the door and things would sort of fly all over the place right at the very morning people come through here and they expect us to have a switch or we can flick the gravity off and people will be floating so you don't have a functional healthy so I suit up for the simulations we're gonna run through three of them a common emergency a dire medical emergency and a full-out meltdown situation the common medical situation we dealt with first was cardiac arrhythmia or an irregular heartbeat however vital signs the pulse ox is 96 and heart rates about 140 what pressure is a 120 eighty percent eighty so the stickers it tells you where to put them so right left upper and lower I'm looking at the images from the monitor right now so I think you're gonna need to get her some medication take one two three medicines in so I got a pause on the monitor and heart rates back it's slower I think we're good she's looking much better next we faced a more dire medical emergency Ripley how to collapsed lung and I got to try out my shot giving skills we were really thinking now of of how does the crew and deal with these events and a semi autonomous or autonomous work if you have an acute episode and it's 20 minutes to wait for a response from the flight surgeon on the ground you don't have that functionality and you got to do it so hey so the crew then has to work autonomously but we're lucky in these simulations we have communication with ground control to help us through these trainings and good thing too because our last test we faced a critical emergency toxic exposure plus a ship malfunction on top of that hi we have an alarm going off it looks like we have a leak maybe an ammonia leak an issue with the ship causes a toxic ammonia we need to put on a personal protective equipment we don't have time for that we don't have time for that on top of all of this one of our solar panels starts overheating which we have to address for the safety of the entire Earth solar panel okay okay can we put the solar panel okay what with this Brett need to do to isolate the solar panel problem so he needs to go into control panel three go to control panel three section J section J okay over these simulations help teams practice better communication and learn how to work together efficiently under stress if you're dealing with a new emergency you don't want to be figuring out how to work together at the same time in the extraterrestrial environment simulating things before they actually occur figuring out the ergonomics of how do you take care of patients under very challenging circumstances is a real opportunity to improve the care that we provide potential patients in the space in a space mission and you only can't really go to space all the time and practice unfortunately you can't go to space all the time to practice so doing this is at least the beginning of the work towards improving the quality of care in in space medicine no astronauts have gone through these simulations yet but Stratis plans to do more behavioral studies and improve their sickbay simulations and their methods could be incorporated into astronaut training someday so I think it's clear that I have a lot more medical training I need to do before I'm equipped to deal with one of these emergencies in space I think it's clear that NASA does too they're gonna have to do a lot of simulations like this one before they send astronauts to Mars NASA is still many years away from sending crews into deep space but when that time comes simulations like these will be critical to training crews to work together so that they'll be able to handle agencies without much help from home if you enjoyed this video and want more space content with yours truly you should check out and subscribe to our new YouTube channel verge science thanks for watching