Astronaut Double Amputeans and Paraplegians?

It’s all about perspective.

And tenacity.

And determination.

And character.

tom-reaching-for-lab-umbilicals-sts098-330-0071After NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos got home from a year in space this past spring, the US Congress began examining whether to provide lifetime health benefits to astronauts. Many are ex-military and get benefits that way. NASA will monitor recipients for long-duration mission health planning.
 
At industrial design school, one of my human factors projects was a spider-like astrogeology exoskeleton, designed so geologists could move along a cliff face looking at strata. And the thinking fed into iteration #1 of my design thesis: one of the first social web wearables; a performance tool for whitewater slalom athletes. But a bigger aspect of the thinking keeps coming back to me: A question that might help address the dilemma of bone loss. A question that keeps coming back after doing WarriorHealth CombatCare and finding out about the fine work done at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethseda, MD.

USMC Cororal Todd LoveIs a veteran with paraplegia or no legs the natural spacecraft driver?

Since bone density loss is a key barrier to long-term low gravity living…aren’t technically-trained veteran paraplegians and double amputees great candidates for the astronaut corps? Does a fighter pilot have the discipline, skill and temperament to be a launch driver? Does an armored division tanker have the skills to be an in-flight systems specialist?

Does USMC Corporal Todd Love (an incredibly inspirational guy! seen here) really need legs to operate in micro-gravity, when he might only need wheels on the ground? (As you can see, he does not need legs whatsoever).

I ask you…

Constellation_spacesuitConstellation_spacesuit-paraplegian2

Could this approach create uplifting new opportunities to serve and thrive in a way that makes the unavoidable SCI injury extraordinarily valuable?

Aren’t two-legged people naturally less abled in the spaceflight environment?

Who is the more-natural space-athlete?

Who is the more-natural astronaut?

David Huer


Numbers

US veterans with Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) as of 2008: 26,000 veterans
http://www.military.com/benefits/veterans-health-care/veterans-with-spinal-cord-injury-disorders.html

US citizens with SCI: 240,000 and 337,000 people
New injuries per year, as of 2015: 12,500 people
http://www.sci-info-pages.com/facts.html

Latest EVA suit made by Oceaneering Inc. (Houston, TX):
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/246726main_ConstellationSpaceSuitSystemBriefing.pdf

Interesting aspects of design/safety aspects
* Effect to bone mass/density and to body functions
* Pant legs + boots: removedaperture and material needs cut by ~40%, with 5 apertures (head, left & right arm, left & right leg) reduced to 3.
* Electronic components & new designs for torso & new “thighboots”
* “Thighboots” reduce the dangers of entanglement & provide push-off tasking as needed
* External prosthetics designed to attach to thighboots

Healthcare research outcome:
Could NASA, the VA and DoD assess impact on SCI to help society groundside?


Images:

US Astronaut Tom Jones (STS-129): https://skywalking1.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/tom-reaching-for-lab-umbilicals-sts098-330-0071.jpg

USMC Corporal Todd Love and Team X-T.R.E.M.E. competing in The Spartan Race, Leesburg, VA, 2012: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2195897/Triple-amputee-veteran-completes-grueling-10-5-mile-endurance-race-called-The-Beast-hours-honor-fallen-U-S-soldiers.html

Constellation EVA Spacesuit: NASA http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/246726main_ConstellationSpaceSuitSystemBriefing.pdf
(Image modified with removal of lower extremities in image)

Could Cloudbox Mimics improve the naturalness of machine-learning?

Creating a “Cloudbox Mimic”
to map Rhizome growth choices, as a self-comprehended ‘hypotheses testing’ learning tool of ever-enlarging complexity

Would ‘asymmetric logic’ help machine-learners practice natural learning?

dhuer-cloudboxing-aIn 2014, I developed the Cloudboxing© thinking technique. Teaching myself to stitch together a set of cognitive cloud datapoints to create a place to study the building blocks of coding language, to learn exactly what code was and where it could be located in my data set. ie. Using my first cognitive language (Liquid Membraning) to translate coding language into the “building blocks” of Liquid Membraning language. See Project #5 at http://davehuer.com/solving-wicked-problems/

Lately, in between work, consulting, and venturing, I’ve been thinking about machine learning and Google’s DeepMind project, and wondering whether the “flatness” of programmed teaching creates limits to the learning process? For example…whilst reading the Google team’s “Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend” article http://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03340v1.pdf

Could we enlarge the possibilities, using spatial constructs to teach multidimensional choice-making?

creating a cloud-box to mimic rhizome growth choicesThis could be a software construct, or a physical object [such as a transparent polymer block, where imaging cameras record choice-making at pre-determined XYZ coordinates to ensure the locations of choices are accurately mapped (especially helpful when there are multiple choices at one juncture)].

Encapsulating and organizing defined space for machine-learned self-comprehension. mimics the “cloudboxing” technique.

And, it mimics the natural self-programmed logic of self-learning…a novel teaching tool for the machine-learning entity:

  • Creating a set of challenges through 3dimensional terrain that mimics pre-defined/pre-mapped subterranean tunnels
  • Creating an opportunity to dimensionally map an emulated (or actual) entity growing through the tunnel system
  • Studying the polar coordinates of the entity traversing the pre-defined space(s)

1) What about using a rhizome?Jiaogulan-Rhizome

. . . Using a natural entity teaches a machine-learning entity to mimic natural learning.

Using a plant creates the possibility that we can map choice-making, using attractants such as H2O and minerals, as a mimic for conscious entities developing learned behaviour.

 

2) Once you have a defined baseline data set, could machines learn better if being blocked and shunted by an induced stutter?

using stuttering blocks to teach choice-decision-making

Perhaps learning by stuttering and non-stuttering might produce interesting data?

By creating a stuttering event as the baseline, perhaps the program will use this to overcome obstacles to the learning process as well as the object of the lesson to learn to not stutter? This could produce a host of interesting possibilities and implications.

3) Things get incredibly interesting if the program eventually attempts to produce choice options outside the available options . . .


Note: These ideas continue the conceptual work of WarriorHealth CombatCare, re-purposing the anti-stuttering Choral Speech device SpeechEasy for Combat PTSD treatment. The research proposal for that work is here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Huer


Images:

Jiaogulan-Rhizome: Own work/Eigenes Foto by Jens Rusch, 29 August 2014  CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.

Drawings: David Huer © 2014-2015

vs. the apparently-most-possible of the allegedly impossible

Colossal_octopus_by_Pierre_Denys_de_MontfortYesterday, one of my friends (founder) asked why I don’t start easier ventures? The reason relates to the framing (and re-framing) of the challenge: No matter what I think about, it has been my experience that the leap-frogging steps of a disruption are nearly always seen as impossible/hard to comprehend . . . 

. . . (and in this, it appears not so much that the barrier is a belief in the “impossibility”, but that the person cannot intellectually follow or comprehend how I got there and ego seems to get in the way).

So, if whatever I do is seen this way, then (perhaps paradoxically) it makes more sense to me to do the biggest scariest monster.

Because this takes exactly the same effort as the apparently-most-possible of the allegedly impossible.

Not to mention massively satisfying.


Image: Pen and wash drawing by malacologist Pierre Dénys de Montfort, 1801, from the descriptions of French sailors reportedly attacked by such a creature off the coast of Angola. Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken