Virtual Reality Training for Sustaining Astronauts’ mental health at CFS Alert

News Article / January 6, 2016, DND Press Release

From the Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College

A team of international investigators is testing a new virtual reality technology at Canadian Forces Station Alert, Nunavut, this winter. The project, which began last week, will see if simulated natural beauty can relieve astronauts’ psychological challenges of living in the isolated confines of deep space travel.

Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Alert, which belongs to the Royal Canadian Air Force, is the most northerly, permanently inhabited location in the world, only 817 kilometres from the geographic North Pole.

The team is led by Jay Buckey, a physician and former astronaut. The project’s primary goal is to find “effective ways to maintain and even improve astronauts’ psychological health on long-duration space flights” to Mars and elsewhere, explains Dr. Buckey, who is the project’s principal investigator and a professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

The virtual reality technology will bring nature’s restorative sights and sounds to the inhabitants of CFS Alert, immersing them in virtual reality scenes from New Hampshire’s beautiful mountains, produced by Dartmouth’s Digital Arts Leadership and Innovation (DALI) lab, and picturesque landscapes from Australia and Ireland. The CFS Alert personnel will also experience virtual scenes and sounds called “Virtual Wembury”, produced by Professor Robert Stone at the University of Birmingham, that allows users to navigate Wembury, a seaside village in the United Kingdom. Virtual Wembury is currently part of a research program in the UK sponsored by the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, evaluating the impact of virtual scenes of nature on the recovery patterns of patients within the Intensive Care Unit of Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

At the project’s conclusion, the CFS Alert personnel will be asked to rate the virtual scenes for their realism and immersion, which scenes they preferred and why, and how the scenes affected their mood and stress.

The Dartmouth-led project includes Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), an agency of Canada’s Department of National Defence, and is supported by NASA’s National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI). The research is designed to enhance psychological health in space, but it is useful in other settings such as intensive care units.

Since 2001, in a separate project, Dartmouth, Harvard and other institutions have been developing the “Virtual Space Station”, an interactive suite of software programs designed to maintain astronauts’ psychological health and to resolve interpersonal conflicts on long-duration missions, with support from NSBRI. The mental challenges of long-duration space flights have been studied for years, but astronauts currently have audio and video access to ground support only when communication links are available. On longer missions like one to Mars, transmission delays will make real-time therapy problematic. Computer-based treatment offers an autonomous way to address these important problems. The current Virtual Space Station system includes self-guided multimedia programs on depression, conflict and stress management.