I think we have mastered a lot of the physical problems that come along with space travel.
But then psychologically we haven't really understood the amount of stress and strain
that people are going to be under.
Astronauts need to be on constant alert. Maintaining a stress response for a long period of time
can lead to exhaustion, we also have problems with things like inter group conflicts.
If you are put in a closed environment with a lot of other people, this can be very difficult.
We also have problems with workload. They are asked to do too many experiments and they don't
get enough down time. It can be very difficult for that individual to say, 'actually I have
some thoughts of anxiety,' or 'I'm starting to feel some elements of depression'.
It can be easier to cover up those issues than actually be honest.
These problems can lead into increases in human error. These are not big issues when
you are on Earth, everybody makes these everyday slips, however if your doing that in a very
risky environment, then that can have really adverse effects.
Measuring bodily stress is done now in the space station, they take urine samples, blood
samples and so on. But when you are talking about the psychological stresses of space
travel the situation is much more complex. One way that we think we can help is to look
at their speech, or in particular look at their speaking. In other words the way in
which they use speech, they way in which they sound and the kinds of words they use when they speak.
Speech is quite a good test of all kinds of states of wellbeing, because it is effected
by both the physiological state and the psychological state of the individual. So to explore whether
we could use voice to detect changes in mood and psychological well being, we look at the
recordings made during the Mars 500 simulated mission to Mars. Six cosmonauts were sent
on a 9 month trip inside a module, although the module didn't go anywhere it was just
parked in a car park.
What we were able to show was that analysis of the audio recordings did indeed show situations
where a particular speaker may have changed their mood, or changed their level of excitement,
or the topic of discussion became exciting which changed the way in which they spoke.
We were able to identify particular recordings which, in our sense, were anomalous.
They did not seem to follow the standard pattern of the person's speech. So we could say; on
this particular day, on this particular recording, the way in which this person was speaking
was unusual.
Whether the way in which they feel effects the way that they speak and whether we can
pick up those signals automatically, and then from that analysis of their voice try and
raise the alarm that the characteristics of their voice are outside their normal parameters.
So anything we can do that we can try to monitor and detect these psychological stresses might
be very valuable in protecting the health of the astronaut.
On short term space missions, psychological issues are manageable, but on longer term
space mission they can become much more important and overcoming them will really help us in
our quest to travel to the stars.