NASA, Google team up to create AI doctor for Mars missions

NASA and Google are collaborating to develop an AI medical assistant aimed at helping astronauts maintain their health during long-duration space missions, such as journeys to the Moon and Mars. 

As missions extend farther from Earth, real-time communication with doctors and resupply of medicines become more difficult, pushing NASA to create more autonomous medical care solutions for space.

According to foreign media, the project, called Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), is designed to support astronauts in diagnosing and treating symptoms independently when no doctor is available or when communication with Earth is unavailable.

The AI tool operates within Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform and uses multimodal inputs including speech, text, and images.

Operating under a fixed-price Google Public Sector subscription, the partnership covers cloud services, app development, and model training. NASA owns the app’s source code and has contributed to refining the AI models, which also integrate third-party resources available on Google’s platform.

CMO-DA has been tested in three clinical scenarios: ankle injury, flank pain, and ear pain. A panel of three physicians — including one astronaut — evaluated the assistant’s performance in history-taking, diagnosis, clinical reasoning, and treatment. The AI’s diagnostic accuracy was rated at 88% for the ankle injury, 80% for ear pain, and 74% for flank pain.

NASA plans to develop CMO-DA further by incorporating additional data sources like medical devices and enhancing the AI to be “situationally aware” of space-specific conditions such as microgravity effects. While it remains unclear if Google will seek regulatory approval for terrestrial medical use, such a step could follow if the AI performs well in space.

David Cruley, Google’s Public Sector customer engineer, noted that beyond space missions, the insights gained from this AI assistant could have broader applications in healthcare on Earth.

By Tamilla Hasanova