CPOD - A Black Box For People

And it can be reconfigured. If researchers choose, almost any kind of sensor could be plugged into the device. The CPOD could, for example, keep track of ambient air pressure, or monitor the concentrations of atmospheric gases.

With such capabilities, the CPOD is likely to prove as important on Earth as it could be to conquering space.

more A CPOD strapped onto a person.

Using the CPOD, EMT's at an accident scene could quickly gain information about a victim's condition. CPOD's could monitor the blood oxygen levels of firefighters inside burning buildings. Physicians could use CPOD's for "outcome monitoring," using them to track a patient's reactions to a particular procedure or drug. Athletes, like divers and mountain climbers, could use them to keep track of their exertion levels. The CPOD's could help monitor pollution, and even treat soldiers on a battlefield.

"There's just tremendous opportunity for a box like this," says Kovacs.

Mundt believes that CPOD's will be helping out in space in a matter of years. Right now, though, the researchers are still testing its performance in a variety of space-analog conditions.

Astronauts, for example, have worked with the CPOD on a NASA mission aboard the Aquarius, an underwater habitat located off the coast of Key Largo. The Aquarius is similar to the space station's living quarters, the Zvezda Service Module, and Mundt and his team wanted to test wireless streaming in that kind of "metal can" environment. "It's very similar to the space shuttle," said Mundt. "There's a lot of reflection of wireless signals, and lots of interference."

Credit NASA A diver approaches the Aquarius undersea research laboratory.

The CPOD has also been tested onboard the KC-135 - NASA's "vomit comet" aircraft that achieves almost 30 seconds of weightlessness for passengers by flying high parabolic arcs. "The flights went really well!" says Kovacs.

Next, Kovacs and colleagues plan to make the device smarter. They're in the process of adding software that can help diagnose problems by analysing the massive amounts of data that the CPOD collects. Such software could hunt out correlations that might explain an anomaly. For example, if a person's heart rate suddenly spiked, such software could connect that to what was happening at the time: whether the person was exercising, or being still, for example.

The CPOD, says Kovacs, is an elegant job of putting the current state of the art in sensors in a compact, integrated package. "It's an incredibly versatile tool," he says. "It's a medical monitor that just about any doctor can use." And it can be used just about anywhere. Despite a CPOD's small size, he says, "it's a huge thing - a really huge thing."