Can we hope for safe interstellar travel?

Jim Preston is left lifeless after he tries to fix the Starship Avalon’s damaged computer module that controls the ship’s vital fusion reactor in the 2016 sci-fi thriller Passengers. The Starship Avalon is on a 90-year journey to a distant planet, and all humans are put in hibernation pods so that when they wake up at their final destination, their age remains the same.

Aurora Lane then drags Jim to the Autodoc, an automated pod with exceptional medical diagnosis and treatment capabilities, and frantically starts pushing all kinds of buttons in an attempt to resuscitate Jim and as she is losing all hope, Jim starts breathing again, and they enjoy a very emotional embrace.

Whether it was the hibernation pods or it was the Autodoc, the film emphasised on the idea that as we (humans) start traversing our astounding universe, we would certainly need some kind of remote medical assistance to survive long distance journeys. The pods shown in the film, though fictional, showed us how indispensable telemedicine would be in making us fulfill our dreams of ‘interstellar’ space travel.

With the next targeted destination being Mars, our neighboring red planet, with the desire to colonise it, telemedicine would undoubtedly be at the heart of these space exploration and colonisation missions.

To infinity and beyond?

Space programmes have helped us develop some incredibly useful spinoff technologies like scratch resistant lenses, artificial limbs, anti-icing mechanisms for aircrafts, ventricular assist device and more, it’s now going to help us through advancements in the field of telemedicine. What’s even better is that these improvements could be utilised to power better medical and healthcare solutions even in the remotest parts of the globe.

In a highly developed urban city, people can go to the hospital to obtain diagnosis and treatment all under one roof. However, building medical facilities in every part of the globe with advanced medical equipment, qualified technicians and doctors to execute the process of diagnosis and treatment in a seemingly fluid manner is almost impossible.

People live everywhere, from the villages on the banks of the great Amazon River to the underdeveloped, rural areas of India, and all of them need access to quality healthcare. But building better hospitals in these areas is an idea that has not yet met fruition due to the many constraints involved.

Sometimes, there are financial issues towards building better healthcare facilities, and sometimes not a lot of doctors are available to serve in a particular geographical confinement.

Also read: Real-time data, pesonalisation, cloud, and AI are disrupting medicine as we know it

However, these obstacles are not very different to the ones astronauts will have to encounter in their space travels. After all, we cannot send a full-fledged hospital into space attached to a rocket nor can we train doctors to become astronauts themselves.

Astronauts have to fend off in very complicated conditions like zero gravity environments, where the risk of bone degeneration and osteoporosis is high. It is highly crucial that these astronauts have access to health care far beyond its traditional realms like simple treatment and diagnosis plans.

In challenging environments (such as outer space) and in the advent of complicated healthcare problems, the issues of real-time medical communication becomes even more vital as treatment plans need to be changed almost instantaneously guided by real-time diagnosis data.

The flow of information on both sides needs to fluid in such scenarios, gilding together things like medicines and diagnostic tools available onboard and doctors present in mission control into a well managed and coherent system. And the achievement of such a perfect data flow system is what telemedicine is all about.

You can put the best MRI machine on board, but the results from its scans need to be deciphered as soon as possible without the scans being broken through transmit. Remember, even a small aberration in data being transmitted over such a long distance is dangerous to the whole process.

Recent strides made in the field of data communications have significantly expanded our abilities to achieve quality data streams without interruptions, even when they are transmitted over long distances.

So near, yet so far

The Concordia station in Antarctica, for example, is one the remotest places on the planet. It’s a place that can easily mimic the hostile conditions that we would find on planets we wish to inhabit in the future.

No plane in the world can land near the station for nearly 9 months of the year. That’s approximately three quarters of the year of being isolated from the world, without the chance of being rescued by any means. The station, with its bizarre conditions, is a means of powering experiments that will help us understand and improve our capabilities to provide healthcare through telemedicine in outer space.

These experiments vary widely, from checking how humans fare in low oxygen environments to investigating the changes in your microbiome environment after living in ‘close quarters’ for extended periods of time but are united under a single purpose. The primary goal of this research is to make life more manageable through advanced healthcare knowledge and administration irrespective of where you are located.

The European Space Agency is also making inroads in the field of telemedicine by promoting things like its “Everywear” program, where the astronauts need to put on wearable sensors, and the data is stored for space medicine specialists to provide better diagnosis and treatment plans.

This program can be used to check anything from cardiovascular conditions to diet patterns. If such technologies are proven to be really advantageous in Space programs, i.e., they help improve the life quality of astronauts, it could then be utilised here on Earth for similar purposes. But this time, the gains would be more widespread, and we could see things like people achieving the best healthcare without the need to visit a specialised healthcare facility.

Also read: New improvements finally make telemedicine practical

Inventions like smartphones could enable these technologies to be turned into telemedicine apps while these wearable sensors could also meet the possibility of mass production as interest grows.

Telemedicine is probably our best possible chance of making the planet healthier than it ever could be through conventional means of doing things, The Space Race on the other hand could provide us with a significant impetus to propel this initiative to circle the globe. Our Avalon might not be ready yet, but we can still offer Autodoc to people here on this Earth, probably within the next decade.

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