NASA is developing a cutting-edge AI medical assistant designed to help astronauts diagnose and treat medical conditions autonomously during long-duration space missions, including the upcoming Mars exploration. In collaboration with Google, NASA has created a comprehensive tool called Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA) that uses speech, text, and images to interact with astronauts.
The CMO-DA operates within Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, integrating AI models from both Google and other third-party sources. This system can function in environments where traditional communication channels are unreliable, making it an essential tool for deep space missions.
Testing has shown promising results, with diagnostic accuracy ranging from 74% to 88% across different scenarios. The tool’s multimodal capabilities – including speech, text, and image recognition – allow astronauts to interact with the AI assistant in various ways, making it adaptable to their needs in space.
The CMO-DA is designed to address health concerns associated with long-duration space travel, such as radiation exposure, muscle atrophy, and bone density loss due to microgravity. By using AI to diagnose and treat conditions autonomously, the tool can significantly reduce reliance on Earth-based communication for medical support.
This technology has broader potential applications, including remote areas on Earth or healthcare facilities with limited resources. According to David Cruley, customer engineer at Google’s Public Sector business unit, “The lessons learned from this tool could also have applicability to other areas of health.”
Source: https://dailygalaxy.com/2025/08/nasa-google-ai-safeguard-astronauts-mars