Tag: NASA

Categories : Medical Research & TechnologyTags :

Spacesuit Tech Leads to Improved Patient Outcomes

On By ModernMedia

A tech startup is pioneering wearable health technology derived from spacesuit technology.

Maarten Sierhuis, a NASA alum, commented to Rachna Dhamija, a tech veteran and his future cofounder saying, “If your dad would just wear a space suit, I could monitor him”. Both had ageing parents with health issues.

Having worked for 12 years as a senior research scientist at NASA, Sierhuis used sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor astronauts in space. When astronauts go on spacewalks, their spacesuits contain various sensors that monitor their vitals, with the data being sent to NASA and distributed to the flight surgeon, biomedical engineers, and others. The ground-based crew uses that information to guide its support efforts—perhaps a reminder to drink some water and avert dehydration, or to take a short break to lower heart rate. This technology—called the Brahms Intelligent Agent platform—was licensed to Ejenta from NASA. Now, hospitals and health systems are using it to help better their patient care.

“When we started the company, we just had a very strong conviction that our parents deserve the same level of care NASA provides its astronauts,” Dhamija said.

Ejenta integrates wearable and home sensors that gather data from patients with AI-driven virtual assistants. Using a chat function, patients can use the platform to exchange messages with these assistants, called “intelligent agents” by Ejenta, right from their homes. Clinicians can securely access patient information from the Ejenta platform to better inform their care decisions.

Advances in cloud computing enabled the technology to be adapted from space to the Earth. Ejenta’s founders use a cloud infrastructure to securely collect, store and analyse health data.

Ejenta—whose name is a Bengali slang term for “agents”— is one of them. The company, which was founded in 2012, originally focused on government-related work, including projects for NASA. However, in the last four years, Ejenta evolved into a digital health company. Dhamija said the company’s AI-driven technology is what makes Ejenta unique from other digital health startups.

“There are a lot of healthcare devices available to consumers, but what’s missing is AI and the automation that can turn this data into insights a doctor can use—actionable data to make care more preventative and more proactive,” she said.

Ejenta uses its NASA technology to take data from wearable Internet of Things (IoT) devices and at-home sensors to monitor a patient’s health. Patients can interact with their assistant via text or voice and ask questions like, “What medication do I need to take with breakfast?”and receive an appropriate answer.

A clinical trial with Ejenta by one of the country’s largest healthcare providers, saw heart failure readmissions dropped by 56%. Readmissions come are costly for both patients and the healthcare system, so this application can save considerable amounts of money as well as improving the patient’s quality of life. Ejenta, in separate clinical trials, also contributed to improved outcomes for women who had high-risk pregnancies, reducing risk for gestational diabetes, preterm birth and cesarean sections. These successes were made possible by years of difficult development.

“We had a big challenge adapting our solution, which was originally designed to monitor 12 astronauts in space, to scale up to support thousands of patients across a number of different customer types and a number of different health conditions while still being HIPAA compliant,” Dhamija said.

However, by leveraging Amazon Webs Servers (AWS) as its cloud provider, Ejenta was able to scale up. Dhamija said her team chose AWS because it offers both flexibility and scalability in a secure cloud environment, which is critical when dealing with healthcare data. Ejenta wanted a “cloud provider that had a reputation for providing HIPAA-compliant services our customers would trust,” she said.

Ejenta was part of the Alexa Accelerator, an Amazon programme to help companies incorporate voice technology into their innovations. Before entering the programme, Ejenta had used Alexa to support improved diabetes care management for patients. It continued this work during the accelerator.

“Alexa is one of the only voice-based solutions that gave us the ability to engage customers, whether it’s patients or their family, with voice and do it in a HIPAA-compliant way,” Dhamija said.

Ejenta’s participation in the accelerator led to its involvement in AWS Connections, a program that introduces startups to large organisations that have specific technological or business needs. Through this programme, Ejenta is developing a health and communication management system for astronauts in deep space to relay health informationa and communicate with their families.

“It’s translational, meaning it can be applied for both Earth and space,” Dhamija said. “If you look at some of the problems we face on Earth or space, they do inform each other, so the goal is to have our Earth-based work inform space, and vice versa.”

Source: Forbes

Categories : Skeletal SystemTags :

NASA Awards Grant for Bone Loss Research

On By ModernMedia


The US space agency NASA has awarded a US$750 000 grant to conduct research into how bone weakening in the absence of mechanical loading, as in zero gravity, can be reduced.

Dr Meghan E McGee-Lawrence, biomedical engineer in the Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy at the Medical College of Georgia, the recipient of the grant, will use the money to better understand how bone loss occurs in space from lack of gravity and also from disuse here on Earth.

“It’s a problem for the astronauts who are on the International Space Station for long periods of time, and it’s going to continue to be a problem for eventually trying to send astronauts to Mars,” Dr McGee-Lawrence said. It is also a problem in patients with spinal cord injuries, undergoing prolonged bedrest or physical inactivity.

“If we can find a way to make bone more sensitive to mechanical loading, then we would be able to increase bone mass with less effort. That is a long-term goal,” she says.

Her focus is the natural sensors of mechanical loading on the bone called osteocytes, and her lab found that tears, called plasma membrane disruptions, occur in osteocytes from mechanical loading, resulting in repair. They showed that these disruptions from loads happen in under a minute, and set off changes like letting in extra calcium, influencing osteoblast and osteoclast activity. If there are few tears from mechanical loading, osteoblasts are not needed and so osteoclasts will resorb some bone matrix. Even walking around has been shown to cause plasma membrane disruptions, something not possible for bedrest patients or astronauts in space.

With this in mind she posed the question, “can we do anything to reverse those processes. Can we do something to the osteocytes to make them either more likely to experience tears or more likely to repair those tears and then, accordingly, make it so there is less bone loss during disuse.”

Fewer tears seem to be not good, and she and her team want to further investigate what happens to the repair rate with disuse. They also want to know the best healing rate; slow for better osteocyte survival, or does osteocyte survival enable faster repair?

“The good news is we can dial it in either direction,” she says. However, they believe faster repair is not better because the calcium influx is linked to the cell’s response.

“Think of a membrane disruption as a doorway into the cell. If you slam the door too quickly, then there is not enough time for the cell to sense that tear and initiate the signaling to respond,” she explained.

She believes that proteins involved in repairing membrane tears, like PRKD1, are logical targets for genetic and pharmacological methods to either increase tears or speed up repair.

“The ultimate goal is can we come up with a way, whether it’s a drug therapy or a different type of regimen that can make these processes work better in astronauts and people on earth who are subjected to disuse as well,” she said.

Even with resistive exercises, astronauts lose bone mass in space. Bisphosphonates are only really effective with age-related bone loss and not loss from inactivity or lack of gravity. With the current most advanced exercise device on the International Space Station, astronauts come back to Earth fitter than when they left but still lose some bone mass. On a three-year voyage to Mars, many astronauts could return with osteoporosis. “That is really a problem. Not only are they losing bone actively while they are in space, at some point they have to come back to gravity… and then what happens?” she says. Recovering bone strength on Earth is a long and difficult process for astronauts. She and her research team are also finding that osteocytes are less likely to repair and survive tears after a long period of disuse.

There are effective therapies, like bisphosphonates, that can help age-related bone loss, but they have not been shown to be effective when disuse is the primary driver. “That is why we need to come up with better targets, more effective targets, to try to prevent disuse-induced bone loss,” she said. While it has long been clear that mechanical load also translates to stronger bones, just how remains a question, she says. She suspects the plasma membrane tears are key.

“We think the formation of these tears is important for how the bone cells know they are being exposed to that level of loading,” she said, with high-impact loading from running and jumping being particularly important. “Cells need a way to know what is going on outside their cell membrane. This is one way to do that.”

Source: News-Medical.Net