Medical Challenges and Care in Space Missions

The characteristics of such settings, considering structures required to support human life, together with the difficulties and costs involved in travelling from Earth to far-off locations, makes it impossible for medical teams to personally assist astronauts. The space environment also generates a series of medical conditions, as astronauts adapt to hypogravity or microgravity, have to deal with psycho-emotional issues, and are continuously exposed to radiation.

Telemedicine and eHealth, which involve the use of telecommunications and technological tools for the acquisition, storage and transmission of health data, and allowing virtual meetings between professionals located in different regions, countries, or beyond, have been used to resolve this problem, providing a solution for overcoming the physical distance between medical doctor and patient.

Speaker

Professor Thais Russomano has almost 30 years of experience in the fields of Aerospace Medicine, Human Physiology, Biomedical Engineering, and Telemedicine & eHealth. She completed a Master’s Degree in Aerospace Medicine at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, USA, followed by a PhD in Space Physiology at King's College London, and a subsequent 2-year experience as a researcher at the German space agency (DLR, Cologne). She founded the Microgravity Centre (MicroG) in 1999 at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, which she coordinated for 18 years until 2017, transforming it into a unique and internationally recognised reference centre in the study of Human Space Physiology and Space Biomedical Engineering, and has been granted 8 patents based on her research. 

Thais is the International Relations Director for the UK-based Human Spaceflight Capitalisation Office (HuSCO), and Director of two private enterprises linked to space life sciences and telehealth – InnovaSpace (UK) and the International Space Medicine Consortium (USA). She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Centre of Human and Applied Physiological Sciences (CHAPS), School of Basic and Medical Biosciences, Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine, King’s College London.