Development and Validation of a Spacesuit Simulator for Collecting Experimental Physiological and Behavioral Data

Spaceflight research has seen an increased focus on developing models of astronaut health, operational readiness, and cognitive states from physiological data during astronaut operations. In particular, astronaut monitoring during extravehicular activities (EVAs) will become increasingly important for future deep space exploration missions to the Moon and Mars with reduced reliance on Earth-based support. A primary challenge in developing models is the ability to collect sufficient, representative sample data in realistic operational settings, and models developed to date have been constrained to using human data collected in laboratory settings. Spacesuit simulators offer a means to collect data in experimental settings on simulated EVA, but a suite of physiological and behavioral sensors and data acquisition has yet to be incorporated into simulated spacesuits. As a result, existing models remain unvalidated in representative environments. Without providing human participants with similar ecological constraints and validity, models trained on lab-based data may not generalize to field EVA operations. To address these gaps, this work presents the development and validation of a spacesuit simulator capable of collecting behavioral, physiological (including neural) data during naturalistic simulated EVAs. Specifically, the spacesuit simulator enables the collection of speech and navigation data as well as functional near-infrared spectroscopy and eye-tracking, recorded from in-suit sensors by embedding data acquisition hardware within the portable life support system. To simulate teaming constraints, the helmet ventilation system forces communication to be mediated by technological devices. Finally, these suits accommodate diverse anthropometries (5th percentile female to 95th percentile male) to enable the collection of generalizable sample datasets. Following fabrication, the collection of these physiological data for future model development was validated in dyads during simulated EVA surface operations.