NASA and Google roll out AI medical assistant for deep space missions
NASA is testing a new AI tool built with Google to support astronaut health on long space flights. The Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA) is designed to help diagnose and treat medical issues when no doctor or Earth communication is available.
The multimodal assistant runs on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and responds via speech, text, and images. The fixed-price Google subscription covers cloud services, app development, and model training. NASA owns the app’s source code and trained the model. 
The assistant was tested on three medical scenarios: ankle injury, flank pain, and ear pain. A panel of three physicians—including an astronaut—rated its diagnostic accuracy between 74% and 88%.
NASA plans to expand the tool with medical device data and make it “situationally aware” of space-specific conditions like microgravity.
David Cruley, Google’s Public Sector engineer, was noncommittal about Earth regulatory clearance, but said the tool could help healthcare beyond space.
“The tool not only could improve the health of astronauts in space, ‘but the lessons learned from this tool could also have applicability to other areas of health,’ he said.”
NASA detailed the incremental roadmap in a recent slide deck.
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