HERMES: a health record that travels with the crew
A mostly software platform that takes in crew biomedical data, manages it on board, and moves it to whichever spacecraft the crew moves to next.
One health record that moves with the crew
Built from every source on board: wearables, medical evaluations, suit telemetry and habitat sensors, kept as one record per person and carried from vehicle to vehicle.
Every source, in its own format.
Wearables, medical evaluations, suits and habitat sensors each produce data differently. HERMES takes all of it in without asking any of them to change.
One record per person.
Access is controlled by role, so the crew, the flight surgeon and researchers each see what they should, and nothing more.
The record follows the crew.
When a crew moves from a capsule to a station or to the surface, the record moves with them, over delay-tolerant links where needed.
Intake from every source
Wearables, medical evaluations, suit telemetry and station systems each record a different part of the same person. HERMES takes them in as they are and keeps one record per crew member, with access set by role.
A record that changes vehicles
When a crew moves from a capsule to a station, the record goes with them over delay-tolerant links, so the flight surgeon and the next vehicle start from the same history instead of a blank file.
The problem
A crew member's health data is scattered across the vehicle they fly on: wearables, medical evaluations, suit telemetry and the station's own sensors, each in its own system. When a crew moves from a capsule to a station, or from a station to a lunar surface, that record does not move with them.
For a private astronaut on a commercial station, the problem is sharper. There is no single agency holding the record, and each operator keeps its own.
Working with Axiom Space
We developed the proposal with Axiom Space, built around a minimum viable version of the software to be demonstrated in spring 2024. In the proposed partnership, Axiom would bring:
The plan was to demonstrate the software on Axiom computers on the ground and then on the International Space Station, where Axiom already had an edge computer.
The team
The proposal was led by Stellar Amenities with a principal investigator experienced in managing health technology, advising healthcare startups and taking medical devices through FDA regulatory tracks. The technical team included a Stanford machine learning engineer who developed molecular docking software for drug discovery. UCLA Space Institute joined as a research partner, with access to the resulting data.
Where it led
HERMES was our first step from habitat hardware into crew health software. The same idea, one record that follows a person rather than a vehicle, carries through to Tom and to the Lab's crew health software.