BME PhD Preliminary Exam Announcement for Peter Zoss (M. Ward, advisor)

Everyone is invited to attend the public presentation beginning at 1:30pm.

Title: Personal Digital Health Discovery and Management of Cognitive Performance during Spaceflight

Date: Thursday August 22^nd, 2024

Time: 1:30pm

Location: MJIS 2001 and Zoom

Join Zoom Meeting
https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/98048240585?pwd=fzvIbVilRxxPW5WkbaCKj52potHXAZ.1

Meeting ID: 980 4824 0585
Passcode: 476889

Committee: Drs. Matthew Ward (chair), Deva Chan, Maria Makin, Eric Palmer, and Steve Steinhubl

Abstract:

Long-term spaceflight missions expose astronauts to prolonged isolation, risking crew death with failure if performance cannot be maintained. Personal wearable devices and VR technology offer unique tools for us to understand mental health and cognitive performance through reflections of activity from the body’s involuntary responses with respect to environmental influences and activity. Three steps must be taken to move towards improved cognitive performance monitoring in spaceflight missions. First, a system is needed to bridge the data sources from various equipment to collect and organize data on a constant and standard timescale. Second, using a combination of sensors from a state-of-the-art wearable medical monitor (e.g., heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, electrodermal activity, and skin temperature) and virtual reality technology, we can track environmental changes and daily activity in autonomic responses corresponding to daily activity. Third, with the establishment of baseline activity profiles in the collected data, patterns of relation can be established with cognitive performance metrics derived from the Cognition Test Battery. The degree of difficulty in quantifying performance is a challenge that has not yet been fully overcome. We expect our analytical methods and data collection systems will be able to find patterns in autonomic biomarkers from individuals to track cognitive functionality without depending on Earth-bound communications. The contextual information added from VR systems and daily activity logs allows for a more reliable perspective on collected data and performance metrics. The proposed system will allow for continuous monitoring of astronauts during long-term spaceflight missions to help maintain cognitive performance levels.