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.”
