Five Canadian companies will have a busy six months ahead of them as they seek to create a prototype deployable unit that may one day form the basis of space modules for health care.
The companies – Baüne, Canadian Space Mining Corporation, CGI, Lunar Medical, and Phyxable – were recently awarded $2 million apiece by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to create unique first versions of a Connected Care Medical Module (C²M²) by end of June.
“I don’t think I can say how many bidders we got, but we got many. It was it was amazing to see innovators in Canada,” Annie Martin, CSA’s Health Beyond portfolio manager, told SpaceQ. Each of the companies has a different focus – such as virtual/augmented reality, or mental health – and will display their work at CSA headquarters next summer.
The CSA is deep in the planning for contributing to the Artemis program to land people on the Moon, which is led by NASA but includes more than two dozen nations in the consortium. Canada’s major contribution is Canadarm3, a robotic arm to service the Gateway lunar space station, but CSA is also contributing through a microrover and a set of payloads that are funded under the Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP). The first set of payloads lifted off for the Moon on Dec. 11 with the Japanese-led Hakuto-R mission and may land in April.
C²M² forms the keystone of Health Beyond, which is a CSA health care initiative meant to service astronauts off-planet – but which also has applications for populations on Earth. The hope is to extend the tech to numerous Earthlings who need support for health, whether they be remote populations or people with mental health conditions.
The CSA wants to deliver modules that can pack a lot in a small package – the goal is something scalable and modular. The contractors were each tasked to work with their team of subcontractors and health care professionals to look at challenges that could arise in space – and to “derisk” the complications of building for space by working out the challenges in low-cost prototypes, following standard practice in the space industry.
The initial contract will push the companies to test their innovative capabilities and also work to define possible standards to ease the development path for future modules, Martin said.
“It’s about monitoring health, using AI [artificial intelligence] for decision support, giving field training for medical intervention and so on,” Martin said. “We’re getting the right set of capabilities to work with. They propose an approach for the delivery of such a system that will work, and will enable a series of medical interventions.”
The pathway to get to orbit or the Moon is not yet laid out; C²M² is not approved for funding beyond this initial stage, but the CSA is working on that, Martin said. It is possible that future iterations would be tested on a platform such as the International Space Station or Gateway before being brought to the Moon, but the CSA will weigh its options when the expected approvals come through.
Martin emphasized that C²M² aims to be deeply interrelated with recommendations from the CSA’s advisory council and to integrate with other health care initiatives such as the ongoing Deep Space Healthcare Challenge, which is tasking companies to build portable remote diagnosis devices that could be used in remote environments such as the north, or in space. For example, it is possible that C²M² could define a standard under which these remote devices would work – almost like Apple, its App Store and the apps that work on it, Martin said.
The CSA is working with other federal government departments to define how health care could be delivered through benefits that arise from the project, which is somewhat complicated as health is a provincial jurisdiction, she allowed. “But we want to work with all the parties,” she added, “so that there’s something in it for them. Our vision, we’ve shared it with many organizations and they all unanimously agreed with the vision and purpose of what we’re doing.”
The vision, she continued, is a partnership to allow for knowledge and technology transfer to health care organizations that would take care of the delivery. Getting there will require context for the participating C²M² contractors to learn in what direction they can build the modules, taking into account “boundaries, constraints or all the possibilities” – and aligning with the necessary regulations as well as what remote communities (or other target audiences) say that they need.
“We’ll see what are the synergies with space, and we’ll find solutions,” Martin said. “That’s where we’ll be in the next months, trying to figure out where are all those synergies in terms of capabilities to develop – and we’ll focus on that.”