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HIGH-WIRE ACT: Ann Micklos
of NASA and Kovacs test CPODs on Mount Adams.
R. Bruce Darling/University
of Washington |
Volcanic rock, temperatures
of minus-20 degrees Fahrenheit, plenty of ultraviolet
light and half the air pressure of sea level. It was
the perfect vacation spot for a self-described mountain
geek like Greg Kovacs—except that the principal
investigator of the Stanford University-NASA National
Center for Space Biological Technologies was on the
job.
After getting acclimated at an 18,000-foot mountain
camp in Bolivia, Kovacs climbed another 1,740 feet to
the summit of Licancabur volcano, huffing and puffing
in the thin Andean atmosphere. Back at Stanford, scientists
were monitoring his vital signs on a computer screen.
“They were saying, ‘Gee, you don’t
have a lot of oxygen in you,’” recalls Kovacs,
professor of engineering, and, by courtesy, medicine.
“I didn’t, of course. But the device was
working.”
Kovacs was testing CPOD, a lightweight physiologic monitor
invented by Stanford engineers, which astronauts someday
may wear in space. Designed for extremely rugged environments,
the Walkman look-alike is part of a system dubbed LifeGuard.
Strapped around Kovacs’s waist and connected to
his body with sensors, CPOD measured his blood oxygen
saturation, respiration rate, temperature, heart rate
and other critical stats, then streamed the data in
real time to a computer at Stanford Medical Center.
There, Judy Swain, chair of the department of medicine,
and astronaut Yvonne Cagle, a consulting professor of
medicine, analyzed the results.
LifeGuard faces years of flight-certification tests
at NASA before it is worn aboard a shuttle or in the
International Space Station. While the Stanford-NASA
team waits for that day, its scientists also are looking
at earthbound applications. Paramedics, soldiers, firefighters
and other rescue workers should find the device useful.
So may patients who need health monitoring in their
homes. “We’re hoping this will be a contribution
to the general public that will eclipse Tang,”
jokes Kovacs, PhD ’90, MD ’92. One goal,
he adds, is to help people with heart problems.
LifeGuard is the brainchild of John Hines, MS ’75,
manager of the astrobionics program at NASA Ames in
Mountain View, and Stanford engineers Kevin Montgomery
and Carsten Mundt. Two years ago, after attending a
conference of the International Association of Fire
Fighters in Las Vegas, Montgomery and Mundt found themselves
at a table in the Luxor casino. As they jotted down
the common needs of first responders on the ground and
astronauts in space, they realized that a wearable monitoring
device could serve both.
“Carsten is the hardware guy, so we called it
CPOD, for Carsten’s pod,” Montgomery says
about their prototype. Previous NASA monitors had been
unwieldy devices pieced together from stuff taken off
the shelf. But wired devices don’t work well for
astronauts, who are constantly in motion. “What’s
cool about CPOD,” Montgomery says, “is that
it’s smart and can transmit wirelessly.”
The LifeGuard system includes the CPOD and analysis
software that can be run on a laptop or tabletPC. The
CPOD can operate for eight hours on two AAA batteries
and has enough memory to store eight hours of physiological
data. And, boy, has it ever been tested. In addition
to the trek in Bolivia, Kovacs and a dozen other researchers
have worn it on climbs up Donner Pass, Washington’s
Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens and Columbia Point in
Colorado. It’s gone underwater, and taken a ride
on NASA’s “vomit comet,” a KC-135
aircraft that climbs to 34,000 feet and then dives to
26,000, simulating weightlessness in space.
Designers hope LifeGuard will be an improvement over
existing medical devices like the Holter monitor, which
cardiac patients use to track their heart activity at
home. Unlike that cumbersome box, which must be returned
to the hospital or doctor’s office for periodic
readings, the CPOD could be worn by people who experience
fast heartbeats. It could take precise physiological
measurements and instantly transmit the data to their
physicians in real time. “You could put this thing
on them, send them home, and read it out the next day,”
Kovacs says. “Instead of asking, ‘Do you
feel better?’ we’d have an objective measure.”
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