NASA Teams Up with Google to Create Space AI Doctor

The project, called Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), is being built to help astronauts stay healthy when no human doctor is around and no one on Earth can help in real time. This digital doctor-in-training is designed to understand speech, text, and even images. It can take in symptoms, help make a diagnosis, and suggest treatments, all without needing a signal from home.

Right now, astronauts on the International Space Station can rely on real-time help from Earth, regular medicine deliveries, and a ride back after six months. But NASA’s upcoming missions -especially those aiming for the Moon and Mars - will stretch far beyond that. These longer journeys demand medical tools that can work on their own, even if contact with Earth is lost for hours, or even days. Hence, the CMO-DA.

The AI assistant is being developed using Google’s Vertex AI platform- the same tech behind many cutting-edge AI tools - and is trained on open-source language models like Llama 3 and Mistral-3 Small. But unlike most AI tools, this one is NASA-owned. Google is providing the cloud platform, but all the code belongs to NASA.

According to a report from TechCrunch, the space doc-in-training has been tested on three sample cases: an ankle injury, ear pain, and abdominal pain. The tool didn’t just fumble through, it impressed real physicians, including one astronaut, who judged its answers to be up to 88% accurate in diagnosis and treatment.

Still, NASA is taking a slow and steady approach. The next version of the AI will start using live data from medical devices like ultrasounds. Eventually, it will be trained to recognise space-specific health risks, like how the body reacts in zero gravity.

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