June 12, 2014

Typical experiment

To face with drastic crew time allocation, easy to fit transducers, online help procedures are greatly considered. Cardiolab has to manage the various cardio vascular experiments: scientific scenarii as well as operational medicine ones.

Two types of experimental sessions are foreseen:

the ambulatory mode sessions,
the stationary mode sessions.

An ambulatory mode session means that one or several sub-modules are attached to the subject, without permanent connection to Cardiolab DMS. In this case, the relevant sub-modules are connected to DMS only for initialization and final data transfer. This type of session can have long duration (from several hours to one day) while the subject performs other activities in parallel.

A stationary mode session means that one or several sub-modules are attached to the subject with a permanent connection to Cardiolab DMS. This type of session is of relative short duration and the subject cannot perform other activities in parallel. In this case, the individual modules are controlled automatically by the onboard software, with or without crew intervention, according to predefined experiment protocol.

The onboard software, and more specifically the application level software allows the scientific scenarii and operational medicine scenarii to be flowed. The foreseen scientific generic scenarii can be classified into:

simple stationary experiments involving one Cardiolab sub-module in flexible scenario such as Air plethysmography sessions. This kind of protocol requires a medium crew interaction,
Ambulatory long term measurements where crew interaction is relatively low, e.g. during an holter session,
Complex stationary experiments which imply high requirements from crew interaction as for instance a measurement of cardiovascular response to a previously defined isometric exercise protocol,
Combined system stationary session, when Cardiolab is used in conjunction with external devices from EPM, HRF, or Checs: cardiopulmonary studies shall include in addition the RMM and the LBNP.

Cardiolab is used in potential operational medicine scenarii like measurements in defined routine medical examinations or medical surveillance of functionel tests in the context of scientific experiments.

The subject/operator have the ability to record voice, text, and video to complete information on experiment flow. At any time in the process, the operator also have the capabilities:

to abort the experiment protocol,
to repeat steps,
to hold execution of steps,
to skip steps.

It is possible to review and modify the experiment protocol with the experimenter's consent according to uplink capabilities.

For both operational medicine and stationary scientific sessions, real time telemetry could be required for real time surveillance of fundamental physiological parameters by ground medical surgeon.

From Pre-flight experimental definition and realisation to post-flight ground processing