Data and Analytics for Human Health at NASA

¹Mortality Research & Consulting, Inc.

²Translational Research Institute for Space Health, Baylor College of Medicine

³National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Human spaceflight presents a unique set of hazards to human health, necessitating ongoing studies and surveillance of astronaut health. However, in spite of almost 60 years of spaceflight experience, from an epidemiological perspective there has been relatively little human exposure to space – particularly over long durations. This sparse data environment makes learning from observational spaceflight data challenging, and requires the use of data from various spaceflight analogs as well as non-traditional methods of analysis. By methods such as analyzing intermediate outcomes along a causal pathway, formulating alternatives to null-hypothesis statistical tests, and utilizing machine learning algorithms, researchers continue to grow our knowledge about the long and short-term effects of spaceflight.

In this talk we will review the amounts and types of human health data available at NASA, and discuss several examples of analytic techniques employed in its data-sparse environment. We will examine the strategy behind health surveillance, decision making tools, and the general epistemological approach behind contemporary health research for spaceflight.