A student from the United Arab Emirates University participates with a team of international researchers, in developing space suits to be strong and flexible, allowing astronauts freedom of movement without hampering their sensory abilities or restricting their ability to perform some movements, especially in space missions headed to the moon and soon to Mars.
The Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the College of Information Technology at the United Arab Emirates University cooperated with Tohoku University in Japan, to study the importance of hearing as a sensory signal that allows astronauts to navigate safely through space, avoiding tripping risks that may lead to severe injuries and even death.
The research team led by Dr. Jose Berengueres studied records found from NASA’s investigation of the Apollo mission to the moon, which revealed that 27 falls and 21 trips occurred due to the difficulty of reading the surrounding terrain, among other factors.
The study measures the impact of hearing on a person’s ability to perceive, understand and remember spatial relationships. The researchers conducted the Fukuda-Unterberger test for fourteen participants to be able to determine the impact of limited hearing on a person’s ability to balance and move.
“All the data we have right now suggests that developing hearing range through spacesuits is critical to the success of space missions, but how much improvement it ultimately represents remains unknown, whatever we can do to enhance the safety of astronauts,” said Dr. Jose. , even at 1%, is worth exploring, especially if it’s a less expensive or weighty option than haptic simulators.”
It is noteworthy that Dr. Jose and his team, which includes university student Maryam Al-Kuwaiti, previously worked on creating haptic feedback devices that are installed inside the shoes to record information about the earth, and they are still testing the effectiveness of placing a type of simple microphone inside the shoes as a cheaper, lighter and more sustainable option.
Although the research team has already started conducting preliminary experiments with microphones attached to the shoes, it is seeking to conduct more experiments and research using a real spacesuit with the aim of obtaining more realistic results. The difference between the density of the atmospheres on Mars and Earth plays an important role in evaluating the effectiveness of integrating the microphone boot into the spacesuit.
Jennifer Fogarty of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, said: “Humans don’t usually realize how much sensory information they are using to navigate in their immediate environment. There are a lot of sensors in our bodies and I think we take them for granted. On the planet, our visual and tactile senses are at work. Well enough that hearing probably isn’t vital, but things might be different in space.”
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