Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 192

This bibliography lists 247 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in March 1979

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 324)

This bibliography lists 200 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during May, 1989. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

The Lost “DOE”: A Quality Improvement Project for Unidentified Patients

A Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) describes any natural or manmade disaster that stresses a community beyond their normal resources (CMS, 2019). Across the globe, populations have grappled with an increased frequency of natural disasters and a surge of critically ill secondary to pandemic SARs-CoV-2 (Cavallo, Donoho, & Forman, 2020; Smith, 2020; US Global Change Research Program, 2018). In addition, the incidence and severity of mass shootings has risen in the United States with a reported 277 active shooter events between the years of 2000-2018 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2018; Smith et al., 2019). An Emergency Department (ED) in Northwest Arkansas (NWA) posed the question: In mock patients presenting to the ED during MCI simulations, how does electronic registration with a unique Patient Identification Packets (PIP), compared to manual registration with John/Jane Doe aliases, affect patient tracking errors within six months? This DNP project aims to increase staff confidence in knowing their role during an MCI, increase efficiency in patient processing, and decrease lost patients during MCI simulations. This quality improvement project looked to the revised Iowa Model for guidance in process development and implementation through a series of MCI drills followed by a final multidisciplinary exercise (Iowa Model Collaborative, 2017). Data collected in this quasi-experimental study was evaluated through descriptive statistics and noted a 16.6% increase in mean confidence level of PIP efficiency, a 2% increase in mean confidence level of MCI roles, and a 0% patient lost rate (Kaliyadan & Kulkarni, 2019)

Test and Evaluation Metrics of Crew Decision-Making And Aircraft Attitude and Energy State Awareness

NASA has established a technical challenge, under the Aviation Safety Program, Vehicle Systems Safety Technologies project, to improve crew decision-making and response in complex situations. The specific objective of this challenge is to develop data and technologies which may increase a pilot's (crew's) ability to avoid, detect, and recover from adverse events that could otherwise result in accidents/incidents. Within this technical challenge, a cooperative industry-government research program has been established to develop innovative flight deck-based counter-measures that can improve the crew's ability to avoid, detect, mitigate, and recover from unsafe loss-of-aircraft state awareness - specifically, the loss of attitude awareness (i.e., Spatial Disorientation, SD) or the loss-of-energy state awareness (LESA). A critical component of this research is to develop specific and quantifiable metrics which identify decision-making and the decision-making influences during simulation and flight testing. This paper reviews existing metrics and methods for SD testing and criteria for establishing visual dominance. The development of Crew State Monitoring technologies - eye tracking and other psychophysiological - are also discussed as well as emerging new metrics for identifying channelized attention and excessive pilot workload, both of which have been shown to contribute to SD/LESA accidents or incidents

Using a Semi-autonomous Drone Swarm to Support Wildfire Management – A Concept of Operations Development Study

This paper provides insights into a human factors-oriented Concept of Operations (ConOps), which can be applied for future semi-autonomous drone swarms to support the management of wildfires. The results provide, firstly, an overview of the current practices to manage wildfires in Finland. Secondly, some of the current challenges and future visions about drone usage in a wildfire situation are presented. Third, a description of the key elements of the developed future ConOps for operating a drone swarm to support the combat of wildfires is given. The ConOps has been formulated based on qualitative research, which included a literature review, seven subject matter expert interviews and a workshop with 40 professionals in the domain. Many elements of this ConOps may also be applied to a variety of other swarm robotics operations than only wildfire management. Finally, as the development of the ConOps is still in its first stage, several further avenues for research and development are proposed

Investigation related to multispectral imaging systems

A summary of technical progress made during a five year research program directed toward the development of operational information systems based on multispectral sensing and the use of these systems in earth-resource survey applications is presented. Efforts were undertaken during this program to: (1) improve the basic understanding of the many facets of multispectral remote sensing, (2) develop methods for improving the accuracy of information generated by remote sensing systems, (3) improve the efficiency of data processing and information extraction techniques to enhance the cost-effectiveness of remote sensing systems, (4) investigate additional problems having potential remote sensing solutions, and (5) apply the existing and developing technology for specific users and document and transfer that technology to the remote sensing community

A preliminary approach to intelligent x-ray imaging for baggage inspection at airports

Identifying explosives in baggage at airports relies on being able to characterize the materials that make up an X-ray image. If a suspicion is generated during the imaging process (step 1), the image data could be enhanced by adapting the scanning parameters (step 2). This paper addresses the first part of this problem and uses textural signatures to recognize and characterize materials and hence enabling system control. Directional Gabor-type filtering was applied to a series of different X-ray images. Images were processed in such a way as to simulate a line scanning geometry. Based on our experiments with images of industrial standards and our own samples it was found that different materials could be characterized in terms of the frequency range and orientation of the filters. It was also found that the signal strength generated by the filters could be used as an indicator of visibility and optimum imaging conditions predicted

Video Guidance, Landing, and Imaging system (VGLIS) for space missions

The feasibility of an autonomous video guidance system that is capable of observing a planetary surface during terminal descent and selecting the most acceptable landing site was demonstrated. The system was breadboarded and "flown" on a physical simulator consisting of a control panel and monitor, a dynamic simulator, and a PDP-9 computer. The breadboard VGLIS consisted of an image dissector camera and the appropriate processing logic. Results are reported