Qualitative Assessment of Terrestrial Care Settings to Inform Self-sufficient Spaceflight Medical Care
Name
porter-et-al-2025-qualitative-assessment-of-terrestrial-care-settings-to-inform-self-sufficient-spaceflight-medical-care.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
3.15 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
84b16cb13aa5baadb6b372641685e4f5
Author(s)
Porter, Allison
Arquilla, Katya
Stankovic, Aleksandra
Date Issued
September 2025
Journal
Wilderness & Environmental Medicine
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Citation
Porter A, Arquilla K, Stankovic A. Qualitative Assessment of Terrestrial Care Settings to Inform Self-sufficient Spaceflight Medical Care. Wilderness & Environmental Medicine. 2025;36(1_suppl):61S-76S.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Introduction
Long communication latencies in exploration spaceflight will necessitate in situ resolution to medical problems. Integrating automation into the care paradigm can address challenges posed by resource gaps inherent to spaceflight operations. However, it is not clear what aspects of exploration care are most well suited for automation integration.
Methods
To probe the potential role of automation in spaceflight medicine, we began by decomposing the human-automation system to first characterize the work domain(s) of the human tasks. Using the lens of point-of-care ultrasound, we leveraged existing analogous Earth medical domains to conduct in situ observations in a hospital emergency department to understand how clinicians process contextual information to provide urgent care using ultrasound and semistructured interviews with specialists to identify key procedural information components for automation.
Results
This investigation allowed us to characterize the dynamic system surrounding a task that does not exist in its intended—currently inaccessible—use case (ie, point-of-care ultrasound on Mars) to guide future human-automation systems development.
Conclusion
We conclude that specific aspects of the care environment that influence the result of a task or process (“mediating factors”) from candidate work domains call for distinct, targeted guidance for automation support and are valuable in providing system developers with tunable automation level and implementation guidelines within and/or between those work domains. Such evidence-based design practice is directly translatable to automation assistance for medical providers in resource-limited environments as well as to any situation where a person's sensory processing, perception, decision making, or response selection could be aided by automation to accomplish a task.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1177/10806032251351589
