ExPod — a multisensory pod for staying connected to Earth
ExPod — the Experience Pod — is a next-generation living quarters that pairs multisensory immersion (visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile) with deep-pressure therapy to counter the behavioral-health stressors of long-duration missions. The need is documented: NASA tracks it as risk BMed-104, the risk of behavioral-health incidents tied to artificial habitable space on long missions. Long-duration crews lose the everyday sensory contact with Earth that keeps people grounded — open sky, the touch of another person, familiar smells — and no habitat module was designed to address it directly.
Design ExPod: a private module that lets an astronaut deliberately reconnect with Earth through sight, sound, touch, and scent, and prove it could be built from technology that already works on the ground.
We developed and pitched ExPod for the Care in Space Challenge — a competition, run with the Aurelia Institute and TRISH (the Translational Research Institute for Space Health), to advance crew behavioral health — and ran it as a systems-integration problem, assembling best-in-class terrestrial partners and qualifying each against spaceflight constraints — immersive projection with Barco and St&Antycip, full-body haptic feedback through CuteCircuit's HugShirt and SoundShirt, programmable scent, and five-sense interaction research with Robert LiKamWa's Meteor Studio at Arizona State University's Interplanetary Initiative. Our systems engineer led vendor coordination, CAD integration, NDAs, and a power-and-reliability assessment against ISS limits, including actuator lifetime and battery draw.
A validated concept and a working partner network for an immersive wellbeing pod, with the technical due diligence — power, durability, maintainability — completed against the realities of on-orbit operation. The concept was validated in review with NASA JSC's Chief Medical Officer. Specifics are held under NDA.
Our Care in Space Challenge presentation (starts at the ExPod segment).
