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Virtual Reality Helmet Designed For Deep Space Surgery
pigrabbitbear writes in with a link about a virtual reality helmet designed to help people deal with medical emergencies in space. "Humans are pretty fragile. A bad break in your hip can mean surgery and months of rehab. That's pretty bad, but what if you fall and break your hip on the Moon, or even Mars? You'd be hundreds of thousands or millions of miles from a fully stocked hospital and a surgeon with steady hands. There's the option of doctor-assisted surgery from Earth — a fellow astronaut performing the surgery with remote assistance from a doctor via video link. But the lengthy communications delay make this a poor option anywhere further than the Moon. Luckily for our Mars-bound descendants, the European Space Agency has a solution: an information-loaded assisted reality helmet that will let anyone identify and perform minor surgery to repair injuries."
Fred."
http://people.tribe.net/turtle/photos/2dbfad5a-28c5-499d-a624-e02c1f526c2a
Break your hip on the Moon? Who'd you think you were, trying to be all "Michael Jackson" with that footwork?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
link
Because with the latency, by the time they get around to actually cutting you open, you'll already be healed, and won't have to do the surgery at all!
Simple. Just bring a large spaceship with a crew of half a million. There's bound to be some doctors on board. Our concepts for aircraft and spacecraft are small and slow, you can't do anything interesting with it. But on larger scales one can bring several reactors and a small city with them, which would also be needed for trips longer then 20 lightyears.
Lets judge the article by the other statements in the article...
That is, once we figure out things like whether tissue will repair and blood will clot in zero gravity.
I'm old enough to have cut the top of my head, and the bottom of my feet, and I haven't bled out yet, in fact healed nicely. So, two datapoints +/- 1 G WRT the direction of the wound is ok. Then we've got quasi-horizontal surfaces, where the G force WRT the direction of the wound is zero, and that clots. So we're all good everywhere from +1 to -1 G just by geometry. Now I know for a fact direct pressure helps wounds clot or close, so I'd give it up to maybe +5 G assuming + is toward wound. High accelerations away from the surface of the wound... I'd have to think about that one... I suppose apply a bandaid to fix the surface tension issue and you're all good.
I've never heard of zero-g hemophilia on the ISS. I am pretty sure I've seen ISS/shuttle era astronauts wearing bandaids. So in practice it doesn't seem to be an issue.
Sooooooo WTF?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So, the idea is sending all of the doctor and dentist torture tools into space, along with a handy dandy user's manual disguised as a helmet. What about just having a crew member who is a surgeon too?
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but -3 CHA and -3 DEX
wow, a whole new meaning to "just in time training"
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
>> I thought you packed the helmet!
> Oh, damn, it's not here.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
But writing software that can diagnose the cause of an illness and guide an untrained person through a surgery won't happen anytime soon. The best this tool can do is storing some general medical knowledge and "projecting" it to the patients body. Just put a doctor on board.
I would think you would have to fall from pretty high up in order to break your hip on the moon.
If you thought a half-second of lag was a bitch in the middle of your CS game, wait until you have to deal with 45 minutes of lag in the middle of your zero-G surgical procedure!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"what if you fall and break your hip on the Moon?" What with all that gravity up there and all.
How about a patient helmet that does vitals/anesthesia?
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TFA mentions wider applications, such as first responders, antarctica, 3rd world countries, and other remote locations. It seems like that would be a much larger user base than space. Why is the focus so much on space applications? It seems like something that would be so useful on Earth, that could also happen to be used in space, not the other way around.
It mentions falling and breaking your hip. Then as a solution this helmet that will help you perform minor surgery. Hip repair/replacement is pretty major surgery.
Regarding the Mars comments:
Even if you get a doctor on mars- or the medical know-how you won't necessarily have the medical supplies of a hospital on earth. If you get bit by a venomous snake- you can almost guarantee they won't have the right anti-venom handy. Snakes on a space-plane would be a disaster.
Seriously though. We need to accept the risks- the first manned mission to mars will be a lonely one-way slow-suicide mission. The first men on mars will be the first men to die on mars.
We need to first send people willing to accept that they are laying down the groundworks for a future colony and that they can't realistically expect to come home or have first class accomidations or healthcare. Instead they get the immortality of knowing they were the first men there and that they will have dozens of moons, asteroids, planets, space cities named after them throughout the millenia.
There would be no shortage of volunteers for such a crazy mission. It simply costs too much to get there and back- getting there is less than half the cost. The first men setup the base. The next wave brings in the doctors.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I can't get to the article because of a content filter. The summary implies that this is some kind of augmented reality thing that can recognize a human and pop up some text and arrows saying, "make incision here." etc. That certainly sounds cool, but If we are capable of producing software that can diagnose an injury and monitor the surgery, why even send people? Can't we just make software capable of driving a buggy around on the moon and picking up some dirt to send back to us?
A new movie with Samuel L. Jackson
I'm sick and tired of these mother-f**ing SNAKES ON THIS Mother-F***ING SPACE PLANE!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I have to ask, why not just send a physician along to any long term deep space mission? There are 5 aerospace medicine residency programs in the country, not to mention the fact that anyone applying for the astronaut positions at NASA gets credited with "work experience" for having completed an MD degree. I believe there are even a few currently active astronauts who are physicians. There isn't much substitute for someone who actually knows what they're doing, and as a (near legendary) trauma surgeon/professor at my medical school is fond of repeating, you can pack a "black bag" with about 10 pounds of equipment that will have you ready for just about anything in the woods, from a emergency tracheostomy to an open appendectomy.
Unless you are planning to live in Deep Space. Then, by all means, proceed.
I am glad to know that repairing a fractured hip is minor surgery now. (I will leave alone the probability of falling and breaking one's hip on the adventure.)
Computers aren't always the solution.
How do you fall hard enough to break a hip on a on a planet with 1/6th the gravity of earth
Astronauts on such a mission would have to be swiss army knives as is due to how few could be sent. You can't send a dedicated physician, he has to have another task to work on and the question has to be asked, what if he gets hurt? You'll need another. I agree that this helmet, or any computer solution, isn't "the answer", but it sure as heck could prove to be a good aid.
Perhaps that's it, we'll have the physician astronauts and the "red shirt" astronauts. The two physicians will never be allowed next to one another.
Really?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
The reptiloids have avoided this problem altogether because whenever they're injured they just change their form into something that isn't injured.
Sounds like an episode of star trek where the alien woman was not smart, but when she put on the magical helmet, the machine gave her fantastic amounts of knowledge into her brain for a short period of time. Of course, it almost killed bones when he tried to put spocks brain back in his body. The bloody alien tech is just never compatible with us humans.
Considering that most astronauts are healthier than average, and considering that gravity is much lower (1/6 on the moon, IIRC 1/3 on Mars) than Earth, I doubt there will be many hip fractures.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
It sounds like this would be potentially life saving in a lot of places where doctors are not immediately available. Of course, having the necessary supplies for surgery are not always on hand, but having them at hand is cheaper and easier than lugging around a surgeon.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
There's a lot more to surgery than a cookbook can supply.
That's one reason why it takes all those years of med school, plus the services of an anestethist and all the rest of the staff. There are a bazillion little details regarding diagnosis, pre-op, anesthesia, and untold practice making incisions, identifying what's what in there, timing,. teamwork, handling all the unexpected bleeders and anomalies. Not to mention that it takes a lot of learnin' and practice to know instantly what your options are when something unexpected happens. I learned this much just watching tee-vee.
If you just follow a cookbook you're very, very likely to get stuck when you cut through the wrong thing. Right down the road here a young woman died when a surgeon tied off her ureters instead of her tubes. And this was a qualified surgeon.
So you're quite likely to end up with a dead patient. Very annoying, especially if you're stuck with the body for another 230 days in a small spacecraft. I hate when that happens.
If this thing ever works as intended, I imagine the next step would be to produce a commercial version. At first it would only be for specialized uses, but the big breakthrough would be when the first general purpose model appears. Connected to the Internet, it would be great to help people with no prior knowledge to e.g. repair a car, or simply cook a tasty meal for themselves with a limited collection of ingredients.
On the other hand, I feel less scrupulous entities would be sorely tempted to use these devices to feed people all kinds of misinformation that would e.g. get them to buy inferior products, make bad investments, vote for the wrong candidates, divulge their bank account numbers, etc. A corporation might end up using this technology to, every once in a while, effectively control large numbers of people.
Does this sound crazy? Well, there have already been plenty of accidents due to people blindly following erroneous satnav instructions. At some point most people just stop thinking about what they're being told to do. Heavy users with poor educations and/or poor critical thinking skills would be the most vulnerable.
Let's hope a FOSS version also becomes available.
Any time you see "minor surgery" you know you're dealing with someone with no understanding of actual surgery. Surgery can be routine, but it's never minor.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency.
Is minor surgery?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
When Mars and Earth are as close together as possible, it would still take over three minutes for radio waves to travel there from Earth, and another three minutes for them to travel back. How do you perform an operation when the delay is that severe?
I am the Emergency Medical Hologram. What is the nature of the medical emergency?
Mars is just a barren rock in the midst of an incomprehensibly vast vacuum. There's absolutely no reason to bother sending humans there--we can find out everything we want to know about the red planet by sending robots (and there's likely very little *to* know, since it is, again, just a big rock).
Moreover, this idea of space colonization as a silver bullet that will resolve all the problems humanity faces is bullshit. People largely fail to understand just how big and just how empty outer space is--there's almost nothing out there to see, and trying to put humans on any celestial body other than the moon would be a massive technological undertaking. Far more important than this are the scientific and social challenges that face us here on Earth--and we'd better resolve them sooner, rather than later, since we're going to be on this tiny blue marble for a very long time.
P.S. The site http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/ has far more compelling arguments than I give here (including actual numbers!)
If you manage to fall and break ANYTHING in 1/6 gravity - let alone a hip! - you're long overdue for some natural selection.
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(There, fixed that for ya)
Send the helmet, not the patient.