Astronauts may learn how to get their bearings in space through a virtual-reality-based training program.

Deliverables for Exploration and Earth Applications

The Sensorimotor Adaptation Team is developing countermeasures to mitigate sensorimotor risks associated with adaptation to spaceflight and readaptation to gravitational environments. The Team’s goal is to define the mechanisms of adaptation, quantify the magnitude and duration of decrements in crew performance and the impact on safety, and develop practical standards and countermeasures. Projects address sensorimotor risk areas including disorientation and manual control, locomotion, and space motion sickness.

Anticipated deliverables include:

• Setting requirements for vehicle displays and controls for lunar landings, and techniques for predicting disorientation and manual control problems due to vehicle accelerations, dust grayout and astronaut head movement;
• Developing spatial ability assessment tests and visual displays for astronaut training on the teleoperation of robotic systems;
• Gait-adaptability training and strength/balance training methods to improve post-flight balance and locomotion;
• More efficient drugs for space motion sickness;
• Development of mathematical models using Observer and Bayesian theories to predict spatial disorientation in altered gravitational environments;
• Development of methods to create vertigo using electrical stimulation, for potential use in landing and extravehicular activity simulations and training;
• Enhancement of technologies to improve spatial orientation and navigation capability of astronauts on the lunar surface;
• Development of ground-based analog of post-flight sensorimotor effects, which would facilitate sensorimotor risk assessment and could be used for crew training and countermeasure development; and
• Basic research on the frequency response of saccular otoliths of the inner ear to better understand the role of this organ in clinical tests of eye movements and vestibular-evoked myogenic potentials.

Earth Applications
Sensorimotor disturbances are associated with many clinical disorders and often accompany the aging process. The Team’s work has the following Earth benefits:

• Development of training programs and sensory-feedback systems can be useful in clinical rehabilitation, potentially aiding in the prevention of falls, particularly in our aging American population;
• Improved motion-sickness drugs will serve to further alleviate the debilitating symptoms of terrestrial motion sickness; and
• Systems mimicking sensorimotor effects could be used for vestibular rehabilitation and pre-habituation prior to surgical intervention.