Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Artificial Intelligence for Astronauts Monitors Patients at Home

When chronic pain flares, the trip from your door to the doctor’s office can seem as difficult as getting from Earth to Mars. The same could be said for the challenge...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Image-Analysis Software Sees Cancer in 3D

NASA Technology

Even NASA can be surprised.

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Low-Outgassing, Space-Grade Coatings Cover Electronics, Sensors, Pacemakers

NASA Technology

You might open a window after painting a room, or let a foam mattress air out before sleeping on it so the materials can off-gas and...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Variable-Gravity Device Enables Medical, Pharmaceutical Research

NASA Technology

Through decades of sending astronauts into space, scientists have learned much about the biological effects of weightlessness. In the absence of...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Fiber-Optic “Nerves” Enable Sensitive Surgery Tools

NASA Technology

Can you make a robot feel? That was the question posed to Johnson Space Center engineer Toby Martin.

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Balance Scale Predicts, Helps Prevent Falls

NASA Technology

The inside of the International Space Station is designed to give astronauts the illusion of verticality in the weightlessness of orbit. The “floors” are relatively...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Space Station Research Platform Paves the Way for Zero-G Manufacturing

NASA Technology

Much of the research NASA does on the International Space Station is designed to better understand how to work and live in zero gravity to...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Remote Monitoring Promotes Community Health beyond Hospitals

NASA Technology

Hospital rooms are full of sensors, screens, and beeps. Those sensors send signals not just to screens in that room but down the hall to the nurse’s...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Fluorescent Paints Spot DNA Damage from Radiation, Gene Editing

NASA Technology

A cutting-edge technique for detecting damage to chromosomes showed enough promise for space medicine that its creators founded a company to market...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Miniature Positioner Focuses Lenses with Precision

NASA Technology

Nobody has ever directly seen dark matter or dark energy, yet physicists and astronomers observe their effects all around us. Dark matter is thought to hold...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Material for Mars Makes Life-Saving Sutures

NASA Technology

Although NASA has sent many missions to Mars, nothing, so far, has ever come back. That’s something the Agency hopes to change—and it is working on the technology...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Biometric Sensor Tracks Vital Signs for Health

NASA Technology

NASA monitors its astronauts in orbit 24/7, aiming both to learn new information about how human bodies adapt to microgravity as well as to keep track of their health...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Unique Polymer Finds Widespread Use in Heart Devices

NASA Technology

A material that a NASA scientist stumbled on in the early 1990s has now helped to keep hundreds of thousands of patients’ hearts beating properly all over the...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Temperature-Regulating Fabrics Keep Babies Comfortable

NASA Technology

NASA’s astronauts are among the world’s most capable, resourceful, and highly trained individuals. Now technology originally created to keep them...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Space-Based Bone Scanner Expands Medical Research

NASA Technology

What happens to bones after months in microgravity? The answers are of keen interest to researchers, who can use the information to offer new insights into...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Tool Kit Simplifies Development of High-Affinity Molecules

NASA Technology

As NASA sets its sights on long-duration missions deeper into the solar system, including a planned mission to Mars, astronauts will need access to...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Space-Ready Spectrometer Offers Terrestrial Advantages

NASA Technology

In the 1990s, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientist Joy Crisp oversaw an effort to get a cutting-edge, ruggedized, lightweight spectrometer on a lander to...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Pressure Garments Save New Mothers’ Lives

NASA Technology

In 1969 NASA Ames Research Center received an unusual call for help: a local woman who had given birth continued to experience abdominal bleeding weeks later despite...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Rodent Research Contributes to Osteoporosis Treatments

NASA Technology

Astronauts know their bodies will be tested during time spent on the International Space Station (ISS), from the multiple sunrises and sunsets per day...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Sterilizing Fogger Cleans Ambulances with a Breeze

NASA Technology

When paramedics come racing into a home, the last thing anybody is worrying about is where the ambulance was earlier that morning. But traces of those earlier...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Optimized Imager Tracks Cancer, Stem Cells in Medical Research

NASA Technology

After earning his doctorate, Debashish Roy set about creating a business from the biological imaging device he’d helped invent as a graduate...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Weightless “Weight”-Lifting Builds Muscle on Earth

NASA Technology

NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid spent hundreds of hours exercising during her 188-day stay on the Russian space station Mir in 1996. Although it was her least...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Virtual Therapist Offers Out-of-This-World Depression Treatment

NASA Technology

Imagine being stuck in a small space with just a few coworkers for months at a time. Each person’s work is crucial to the success—even the...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Biometric Sensors Optimize Workouts

NASA Technology

What if, as a pilot was pulling heavy G-forces and headed toward a blackout, a voice in his or her ear said, “Pull out of the turn”? What if ground control had a screen with...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Compact Spectrometers Unveil Clues to Diagnose Cancer

NASA Technology

It may seem hard to remember now, with thousands of planets of various types and sizes discovered throughout the galaxy, but back in the 1990s, the field of...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Fluorescent Diagnostic Test Readers Offer Fast, Low-Cost Results

NASA Technology

NASA astronauts are screened for sound health, among a slew of other requirements, but no one is invulnerable, especially in space. For reasons not...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Cooling Garments Find New Medical, Athletic, and Industrial Uses

NASA Technology

When Bill Elkins started working on liquid cooling garments to keep early astronauts cool, no one saw a use for them beyond maintaining thermal...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Mini Heat Pipes Wick Away Heat in Brain Surgery

NASA Technology

Neurosurgery is one of those things where you want the tools to be as precise and reliable as possible. One important tool of the trade, bipolar forceps, uses...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Active Pixel Sensors Lead Dental Imagery into the Digital Age

NASA Technology

They’re in your cell phone camera and probably in your handheld digital camera, but they may have been in your dentist’s X-ray machine first:...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Space Grant Research Launches Rehabilitation Chair

NASA Technology

A stay on the International Space Station is no vacation. During a visit to the orbiting National Laboratory, astronauts divide their time among a variety of...