“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, the home of human spaceflight, stationed in Houston, Texas. We bring space right to you! On this podcast, you’ll learn from some of the brightest minds of America’s space agency as they discuss topics in engineering, science, technology and more. You’ll hear firsthand from astronauts what it’s like to launch atop a rocket, live in space and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. And you’ll listen in to the more human side of space as our guests tell stories of behind-the-scenes moments never heard before.

Episode 37 features Dr. Tina Holden, Human Factors Technical Fellow with Leidos, who talks about the challenges that astronauts may face when interacting with computers. Holden discusses some of the research that has been done on the space station to investigate these issues. This episode was recorded on February 27, 2018.

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, We Have A Podcast! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 37, Human vs.Machine. I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. So, on this podcast, we bring in the experts, NASA scientists, engineers, astronauts, sometimes some of our partners, we bring them right here on the show, and tell you all the cool stuff about NASA. So today we’re talking about how NASA is looking at how astronauts work with computers with Kritina Holden, she goes by Tina. She’s a Human Factors Technical Fellow with Leidos here at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. We had a great discussion about research being done on the International Space Station that tests an astronaut’s ability to use computers and tablets in their day-to-day tasks, and what needs to be done to ensure success in their use for future missions that send them deeper into space. So, with no further delay, let’s go light speed and jump right ahead to our talk with Dr. Kritina Holden. Enjoy!

[ Music & Radio Transmissions ]

Host: Well, Tina, thanks for coming on the show today. This is — this is a very interesting topic because it’s about the way humans are interacting with basically computers, with tablets, and you wouldn’t normally think that that’s an issue, right? You think, oh, I can play with my phone, I can play with a tablet, obviously, astronauts can do it on board, but there’s more to that story, right?

Kritina Holden: That’s right! First of all, thanks for having me, I’m happy to be here. The crew do use tablets everyday on the ISS, so it is a very common thing, and they use it to provide additional information, reference information, they use it for personal use, recreation. The tablets haven’t really been used for critical operations yet, and we haven’t really measured performance with the tablets yet. So while we know they’re able to complete task, we don’t know a lot about how quickly they’re completing task with the tablets or how many mistakes they’re making, that sort of thing. That’s why we’re really interested in making sure these are good devices so that they can be used for future critical operations.

Host: So basically the studies that have been conducted so far have been investigating this component, right, just to make sure that this is something that can work, but beyond that, how efficiently it works, how — how much you’re going to go into it, that still needs to kind of be determined?

Kritina Holden: Exactly. That’s been the focus of a lot of our research over the last couple of years, making sure that crew members will be able to accurately interact with computer-based devices, like touch screens or gesture devices.

Host: Okay, and let’s just dive into it, right, because you — you’ve done quite — you have quite an extensive career based on studying this exact thing. So, let’s just start from the beginning, how did this question come up? Because I’m sure, at some point, we realized, hey, we should probably look into these computers and make sure that astronauts are — can actually interact with them.

Kritina Holden: Exactly. It’s — it’s really interesting, in the past, crew have primarily controlled their vehicle by using hundreds of switches. The shuttle had hundreds of switches in the cockpit and dials and knobs and things like that. Now, for the first time, with these new spacecraft under development, crew will be interacting with systems that are primarily computer-based. So the controls are software based rather than all the switches and knobs. So what that means is that you have to have a way to interact with that software-based interface, you have to have a cursor controlled device or you have to have a touchscreen, something like that. We know, from the research that’s gone on, that a lot happens to the human body when you’re in extended microgravity. But what we don’t have a lot of data on is what happens to fine motor performance. So that’s the kind of performance that you need to interact accurately with things like touchscreens. So that’s why we saw this as something important to really look at, and a key focus of the research is making sure that on a long duration journey, like to Mars, when crew go down to the surface, that they’re able to accurately interact with computer-based controls.

We know that that gravitational transition that happens between microgravity and being on a planet surface does a lot of things to the human body, they have to adapt to the new G atmosphere. And so, we need to make sure that they’re able to accurately use those devices.

Host: Okay, so when you say computers, we’re talking modern computers and, I guess you could say ever-progressing computers, because we’re talking tablets now, but, I mean, who knows, there might be something down the future that we’ll need to adapt to, maybe, I don’t want to speculate, but, you know, anything really. And we’ll have to kind of adjust along the way. So when you’re talking about these fine motor skills, and these are the skills, really, that it takes to interact with these computers. What are some examples on earth that — that you use, what’s a — what’s a fine motor skill that you can do, I guess, at your desk or — or something here on earth? 1G?

Kritina Holden: Well, mostly we use fine motor skills every day in the course of our work. Most people interacting, as you mentioned before, with their phone. It has a touchscreen and so you do pointing and dragging and clicking on targets, and so this is something we do every day that people are very practiced at. Again, what we want to know is, does the extended microgravity environment, does it transition to a different gravity effect? How well you’re able to interact with devices like that.

Host: So it’s basic — so when you say effect, it’s mainly — it’s mainly how your brain is interpreting these fine motor skills, making sure that if there is a button on a small screen, that you can click it. If there’s a task that requires you to drag from one place to another, that’s something that you can accomplish easily. Is that — is that right?

Kritina Holden: Yeah, it’s a complex picture. It might be things happening to the brain, you know, crew are going to be affected by radiation, by perhaps CO2 levels, it might also have to do with muscle deterioration. We know that muscles atrophy in long duration, microgravity, so that might have an effect. The eye/hand coordination needed to accurately point at a target, so, these things all play together to make a performance.

Host: I see. So it’s more like a mix of cognitive performance, making sure your brain can actually understand and do the task, but then also the physical ability, making sure that you’re strong enough, or — or that you have the coordination, okay. Okay. So a nice combination of the two. So those are the main concerns, what were some of the concerns in previous technologies, before — before we started looking at these new computers, I guess were we investigating the knobs and switches kind of computers?

Kritina Holden: A little bit. I think most of the concerns, as I mentioned before, come from the fact that we have a whole new way of working, you know, with these software-based controls. We have a history of space flight in cockpits and aircraft with cockpits that use a lot of buttons and switches, and so, there’s been some research done on that, but — but no big concerns, no big unknowns like we have now.

Host: Okay. And that’s — that’s why we’re doing these investigations. One of the things that you were the principal investigator of was one that was looking at screens during launch. So what’s that all about?

Kritina Holden: Yeah, so this is very interesting. During the early days of Orion and the design stages, it was discovered that the vibration profiles for this new vehicle would be very different from that of shuttle, and so the question came about, will crew be able to accurately read displays on their monitors during a launch? Because even though in advanced spacecraft, where crew may not have to actually control things, they — they will mostly be monitoring, they do need to monitor, it’s really important that they’re able to see the displays during launch. And since we didn’t really have any data on that, it was important to do some research in that area. So, luckily, we were funded to do some research through the human research program, and also through the Orion program, to look at what does different vibration levels do? What do different vibration levels do to your ability to read text on a display? It started with some studies at Ames Research Center, they have a vibration facility there, and so they conducted some experiments, they’re colleagues of ours, and then we also had an opportunity to do a quick test on the shuttle middeck during a launch where we actually had crew try to read text of different sizes during launch and let us know, what is the smallest size that you can read?

And all of these studies together helped us figure out, you know, what are the bounds of performance, what’s a recommended font size, and that sort of thing.

Host: Woah, during an actual launch? Was it a — was it a piece of paper or was it a screen that was actually within their view?

Kritina Holden: Yeah, ideally, we would have done an actual screen because that’s what’s, you know, closer to the real thing, but because of safety concerns and such, it was done with paper. So we actually mounted really high fidelity paper displays in front of the middeck crew. So they were reading different lines of text during launch, and then responding on a kneeboard, to — to which font sizes were most readable.

Host: I’m sure they have some — some interesting descriptions of how that went, because you’re holding this — this kneepad, I guess, in front of you, and everything is shaking so violently, especially from — from what I’ve heard about shuttle astronauts, it’s very different from a Soyuz launch. Soyuz is a little bit smoother. Shuttle has that extra, little vibration, and — and is there anything that they’ve compared it to that — that can help, I guess me, understand what that vibration environment looks like? Maybe some kind of intense — I’m imaging a roller coaster ride.

Kritina Holden: Maybe so. The vibrations are very different from that experience and other domains, like maybe, you know, there’s some research on vibrations in a tractor or military vehicles, things like that, where they’ve done a lot of research, but the direction of the vibration is very different on spacecraft vehicles. That’s why we really have to depend on these vibration facilities. As I mentioned, there’s one at Ames and now there’s also one at JSC where we can do that kind of research.

Host: Okay. So, when — when you’re looking at the screen, and what’s — what’s the screen that you’re actually looking at? I guess it’s — it’s different, I’m imaging a Smartphone, but it’s — the screens that are in spacecraft, especially the Orion, like you’re talking about, they’re going to be a little bit different, and maybe the displays will display text that’s maybe a little bit smaller than we’re used to. What’s — what’s that look like? What do the screens look like?

Kritina Holden: Well, it depends which — which cockpit you’re talking about. You know, I work with Orion, as well as some of the commercial vehicles, and so each vehicle kind of takes a different approach, but one of the big jobs of human factors folks is to make sure that that text is not too small, because it is important that the crew be able to read the text quite easily, without straining from the position that they’re sitting. Often, the displays have to be read when they’re seated and restrained, and so we need to make sure the text is large enough.

Host: So, I’m guessing you’re working with the engineers then pretty closely to say, hey, from a human factors perspective, maybe a text size this big would probably be most beneficial, but I guess from their perspective, they want to fit maybe more on — onto the screen, and say, no, because the screen, basically this display is for this, so, I guess you kind of have those battles, right?

Kritina Holden: That is absolutely our daily challenge is making sure we get that — that correct balance. As much information as the crew would like to see on the display, but not too much so that you can’t really read or easily access what you need to locate on the display.

Host: The Goldilocks of font sizes.

Kritina Holden: Yes, that’s right. [Laughter]

Host: So what are you finding then? Based on some of the studies that you’ve done and the vibration environment, how — how difficult or maybe easy is it for astronauts to reach screens?

Kritina Holden: So far, we haven’t found a lot of problems. Now, as the program has progressed, they’re making changes to the rockets, and everytime they change the rockets, the vibration profile changes. So I believe they’re about to do a new set of studies to make sure lateral vibration, which is the new concern, doesn’t impact, you know, the ability to read displays. So it’s a — it’s a constant investigation as the design changes.

Host: I guess that’s good, because as these — as more and more, even, I’m thinking about commercial industries, right, you know, developing their own rockets or maybe a lot of the human factors elements that you’re studying right now, lateral vibrations or — or whatever can be translatable to — to commercial industries, to designing these screens, and making sure that astronauts can read them.

Kritina Holden: Yeah, that’s absolutely right, and that’s one of the nice things, the way we’re set up, the human factors people who support the programs here are often called upon to be subject matter experts for the commercial crew vehicles too. So we can take the lessons learned from Orion and then apply them to the commercial vehicles and development.

Host: Have you ever gone in one of the vibration simulators to see what it’s like from — from a principal investigator perspective? And kind of see, firsthand, what — what — what some of the test subjects and astronauts are dealing with?

Kritina Holden: I’ve watched it, I have not had the pleasure of riding the vibration chair, yes, I passed on that opportunity.

Host: [Laughing] I would definitely want to go! I’m just saying. Okay, so, I guess beyond the looking at the screen, there’s — do you measure actually interacting with the screen, or — or components beyond just the visual?

Kritina Holden: Absolutely. A big part of the work in my career has been on cursor control device design. So, it’s been quite interesting, again, at the beginning of the Orion program, we knew that we needed some way to now interact with all of these software-based controls, and you might think first of typical cursor control devices, a mouse, a trackball, something like that, would that work? And so we actually did a lot of research looking at standard commercial devices, like tracks, trackballs, and mice, and different things like that, touchscreens, and working with the program, we were able to put a big database of data together to look at what types of controls provide the best performance. The challenge with Orion is that we needed a device that could be used under vibration, under acceleration in microgravity, and with and without pressurized gloves. So that’s a tall order. There are a lot of constraints there, and so you have to think about what type of controls do we need to select, should the device be movable, should it be a fixed design that you can kind of hold onto?

A lot of challenges, but we did a lot of research looking at different types of controls and ended up building a custom device for Orion, it’s still baseline, and we did a lot of studies on it, we did some studies in a pressurized glovebox to make sure that you could feel and actuate the different controls. If you can imagine a pressurized glove, it’s very difficult to feel the buttons beneath your fingers, it’s difficult to bend your fingers, to turn things or press different types of controls, so it was very challenging.

Host: Wow! I — I mean, I’m trying to imagine the look of this device, and I’m imagining a joystick, but I think it’s got to be more complicated than that.

Kritina Holden: It looks quite alien, actually [Gary laughing]. It looks nothing like a joystick, but it’s — it looks kind of like a large mouse with a lot of different buttons. So it’s got a rocker switch and a castle switch, and all — all sorts of switches that, interestingly, came from a lot of inputs we got from crew who were previous pilots for fighter jets and things, and they would say, you know, as we were doing our studies, hey, in my aircraft, this is the kind of control we had and it worked really well and it worked under G, you should consider it. And so we would get in those switches in the lab and do some studies with it to decide if it was a good candidate to be part of that Orion cursor controlled device or not.

Host: Alright! Was there — was there a period of trial and error with some of those commercial devices you were talking about, or just was it more of a consideration phase, and then as you started learning more and understanding, okay, maybe — maybe custom is the way to go. You went that way?

Kritina Holden: Yeah, we did a lot of trial and error or different walkthroughs. We bought a bunch of commercial devices, we had crew come into the lab and put their hands on them, and — and we gathered feedback from them and talked about pluses and minuses and how would those type of devices work in microgravity? And so it was a line of research that started with things like that and then slowly developed into testing a custom device.

Host: So, is there a right-handed and left-handed version, or are they pretty unanimous?

Kritina Holden: So for the Orion design, it’s meant to be used with the left hand, that’s just their particular design. You could — you could have something similar to be used with the right hand, but this — this one’s been designed for the left hand.

Host: Okay, yeah, and you — and, particularly for the Orion displays, I think they have controls sort of along the border of the screens, and I guess maybe that frees up the right hand to — to interact with some of those…

Kritina Holden: They do, they have edge keys around the screens, and they also have a — a rotational hand controller, and that’s — that’s why they keep their right hand free. And a lot of this work, I have to mention, we worked very closely with the crew interface rapid prototyping lab, and they’re the ones that did a lot of this prototyping and a lot of the programming so that we could do the studies.

Host: Okay! Alright, so kind of, you just basically threw this interaction with the rapid prototype lab and with astronauts, constant feedback, you developed this great device that’s — that’s perfect for what it’s going to be used for, and that’s during a launch environment, it’s going to work with a pressurized glove with all of those constraints that you talked about, I mean, that’s a lot of — a lot of obstacles to work with, quite an — quite an obstacle course.

Kritina Holden: Yeah, we — we sure hope so! Now, you know, it hasn’t been tested actually yet, so this — this is for Orion, and we haven’t done the first manned test yet, so we — we’re very eager to see how it works.

Host: Alright, I wish you the best then, for sure!

Kritina Holden: Thanks!

Host: So, going, I guess past Orion and backing up a little bit to International Space Station, one of the studies you worked on was the fine motor skills, and that was — that was quite a long study, you want to talk about kind of how that started, and — and then the purpose of it?

Kritina Holden: Sure, sure. This started probably in 2013 or ’14, they were soliciting the human research program, solicited for research on the first-ever one year ISS mission. And so we put in a proposal to look at fine motor skills. As I mentioned, we’d been researching cursor control device designs, and what we had discovered is in the course of a lot of that research and developing some cursor control device test batteries, we realized that fine motor performance is a big part of using a cursor control device, and, perhaps, some of the test battery tasks that we had developed could be used specifically to look at fine motor performance. So we wrote a proposal and submitted it, and, happily, we were accepted to be one of the, something like 27 studies, performed as part of the one year mission. And, you know, that had two participants. We had a U.S. and a Russian cosmonaut as our subjects.

And so that study completed, but we also supplemented it by having data collection with standard duration crew members as well. So the whole study had the two one-year subjects, and then we have an additional seven standard duration subjects. And our last subject just finished participation in December. And along with the flight subjects, we have ground subjects. So, to find out what performance looks like over the course of a year or six months, on the ground versus in flight, that’s why we run the ground subjects, and our final ground subject completes this Friday. So our study will be finished this week, and we’re very eager to do the final data analysis.

Host: Wow! This is a good — this is a good time for you! Awesome! Fantastic! Congratulations…

Kritina Holden: Thank you!

Host:…to your team for doing it for that long. Wow, so — so it went through — so I’m imaging Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko, that was — that was 2015 to 2016, I believe, right? So then you went a couple of increments past that then?

Kritina Holden: Right, right. Because we wanted to not only know what happens over the course of a year, but what happens over the course of six months? So maybe we can look at that data to see, you know, does performance stay the same for six months and then degrade for the last six months, or is there any difference at all? Because we want to start looking more and more at longer duration missions to try to extrapolate the results to a future deep space mission, for example.

Host: A lot of great data, for sure. So then — so then, what did they do? What was the fine motor skills study?

Kritina Holden: So the study was conducted on an iPad, so, again, we’re interested in touchscreens, and — and that sort of performance. And we were one of the first studies — first science studies to be done on an iPad on ISS, so that was kind of neat, but it was very much like a set of four different games that they completed. The test battery that they used, the fine motor test battery, consisted of four types of tasks. One is a pointing task, one is a dragging task, one is a shape — shape-tracing task, and a pinch/rotate task. And we specifically selected these different tasks to look at different aspects of fine motor performance. So the test battery that they interacted with lasted about 15 minutes, as they worked their way through these different tasks, and for half of them, they used their finger, and for half of them they used a stylus, because we also wanted to look at how does accuracy performance in general differ between using a finger or stylus on a touchscreen?

Host: Okay. So, huh, that’s interesting. So they did that 15 minutes. How often? Several times a week or was it more kind of spread out?

Kritina Holden: So, they had four sessions before flight, then that was sort of our baseline data collection phase. They had two sessions within the first week. They had a session once per week for about the first three months, and then every 14 days for the remainder of the mission. And then, post-flight, we had two measures on landing day, and then a measure on return plus 1, 3, 5, 15, and 30. Because we’re very interested in what happens to performance when the body goes through that gravitational transition of landing, it’s pretty severe, and then how does performance return to normal baseline levels, or does it?

Host: Okay, so you have data from the one-year mission, you have it from beyond. Are you starting to get some good data that you kind of have a better understanding of how things are changing in the fine motor skills or is it still really too early?

Kritina Holden: We have some initial indications, so, some interesting things we’ve learned, the first question, you know, does performance differ, does it change across a period of a year in microgravity? We don’t actually see a lot of changes, so, the changes that we do see is actually improvement. So the more crew members do the tasks, the better they get, and they continue getting better, at least through half of the mission. So this — this demonstrates something important, that you can improve skills in microgravity. We were concerned about, you know, finding any derements over the course of a year, we didn’t really see that. Now, where we did see big impacts were the first week on orbit and right after landing. So, you might predict that, because, again, the body is going through a lot of changes trying to adapt first to a microgravity environment the first week of flight, and then on landing, your body has to adapt back to the one G of earth, and it’s those transitions where we see a big hit to performance.

So the first week, and then the first days and weeks following landing, there — there’s a negative impact to performance.

Host: That makes sense because it’s the most, I guess you could say the most drastic change to the human body. It’s — you’re entering a whole new environment when you’re launching into the microgravity, and then, again, same thing when you’re coming home. Now, all of a sudden, you’ve got this one G weighing upon you. So, how long did you find that — that this performance, I guess stuck? When you — when you saw the performance change, how many days was it, or maybe hours, minutes, until, I guess, things were a little bit back to normal?

Kritina Holden: So that’s something that we’re still refining the analysis on. We’ve got a few more subjects to add to the database, but, in general, we still see out to R plus 30, we — we see a little bit of decrement. The big impacts are within probably the first week or so. And the reason this is potentially concerning is, as I mentioned at the beginning, if you’re on a long duration voyage, and you go down to the surface, there’s probably a lot of things that you’re going to need to immediately attend to, whether it’s configuring your spacesuit, or, you know, setting up something in the vehicle, safing the vehicle, deploying a robot, setting up a new habitat, there are things that — that are going to require interaction with a computer, and so it would be good for us to know now if we can expect a lot of errors, a much slower performance during this period, so that we could either, you know, extend the schedule, give them a wait period in the schedule or, perhaps, come up with a countermeasure, a way to mitigate those problems, perhaps, excessive practice right before landing, something like that.

Concentrated practice. There’s a lot of different ideas that we’re kind of playing with now, if this is a real problem, what do we do about it?

Host: But, I guess, it’s — you have identified as — as a concern already, right? Because we’re — we’re thinking, let’s say we land on Mars, there’s this period of time where, oh man, I guess an astronaut might not be able to perform with a computer as we hoped! And that’s — and that’s true for — for a lot of other things, too, even equilibrium, your equilibrium is off, now you’re — you’re feeling kind of dizzy and — and there’s a lot of other concerns, even the muscle and bone that, immediately, when astronauts land, even on earth, there’s this small period of transition, but on — on Mars, you’re by yourself. You don’t have anyone helping you out, so…so that makes sense. And your countermeasures, I guess, that’s a good thing to investigate, you want to figure out maybe — maybe there’s something we could to help them, maybe to at least, at the very least, shorten the amount of time that they are going to be experiencing these bad things, because, ultimately, they are going to have to interact with a — with a computer, they’re going to have to open the hatch, they’re going to have to open up their tasks lists, and see what the landing procedures are. Man, there’s a lot — there’s a lot of implications there.

Kritina Holden: Right. And — and to be fair, in our analysis, as I said, we — we haven’t completed all of the statistics yet, we’re still looking at it, so the important thing for us to figure out, the changes that we’re seeing, are they practical changes? You know, are they — they might be statistically significant, but — but is it a practical change? Is it a big deal? Is it something we really have to worry about? That’s what needs a little bit more of our time, to look at the numbers, to look at the performance decrements, to see exactly how bad it is. It may be that for non-critical tasks, it’s not a big deal, maybe for critical task it is, that’s — that’s still something that we’re looking at.

Host: So within the test, I guess, how — you talked about some of the — some of the gestures they were doing, they were doing a pinch rotate, they were doing a pointing, you got all these different things. How fine were you going? Were you — were you — was it — was it pretty fine to begin with? Did it change over time? Or was it — what was the, I guess, the fineness of the fine motor study? Fine motor skills?

Kritina Holden: So, I’m not sure what you mean by the fineness?

Host: So, I guess [pause], let’s say you have a — you have a drag and…or you have the stylus and you got to draw a line. Maybe it’s like a really thin line, and you’re testing the accuracy within so much distance, or something? How fine were you going?

Kritina Holden: So we have pretty much pixel accuracy.

Host: Oh, wow!

Kritina Holden: We’re recording every movement of the stylus or the finger. The software collects all of the response times. Anything that’s touched on that touchscreen is recorded. So we have the ability to go back and replay the session to see what it looked like. We can see where they traced and — and where they missed boundaries. We can calculate how big those deviations are from the actual target. So we have the ability to do a pretty detailed analysis of what they did.

Host: So, based on your findings from how — how well the astronauts could perform with these fine motor skills, is there a consulting phase, I guess, where maybe for designs of — of any — something on a tablet or an iPad or whatever, you would help to say, from a human factors perspective, hey, you really can’t — you really can’t go that fine, or maybe you should do these sorts of movements, because these sorts of movement are better? Is there like a consulting element to — to the human factors?

Kritina Holden: Yeah, I think we will get to that point in our final recommendations. For example, some of the — the tasks have smaller targets versus larger targets. It could be that after we do the — the full analysis, we make a recommendation that, you know, targets of this size or smaller should not be used because after extended microgravity, or after going to the earth’s surface after being on a mission, they’re not able to touch these — locate these targets with accuracy, so let’s just avoid those target sizes.

Host: That makes sense. So, then, is there anything, based on the fine motor skills study, that could be taken towards, I guess earth? Like any kind of fine motor skills applications or situations where something or someone would be in a situation similar to an astronaut where this study would sort of translate?

Kritina Holden: Yeah, we think so. As part of this study, you know, we developed this fine motor skills test battery piece of software, and we think that it could be really useful for populations who have trouble with fine motor skills, so that might be people with Parkinson’s or brain injuries, things like that, where you see decrements in fine motor performance. We think that this test battery might be a quick, easy tool for them to use for maybe diagnostics or rehabilitation. We have talked to several people in the medical industry who are interested in looking into that with us.

Host: Okay! So, I guess going back up to space, you know, beyond earth, thinking about applications maybe towards the future, this fine motor skills study was taken specifically on an iPad in the International Space Station, in the habitable — inhabitable environment of the station, are — are there ways to translate some of these findings to maybe other, I guess, maybe into a spacesuit, where fine motor skills are even a little bit tougher, because now you got these big — these big gloves? Or maybe future spacecraft or maybe — maybe habitats? You know, another place where this fine motor skills knowledge can — can be dispersed?

Kritina Holden: Yeah, we think it’ll be applicable to any sort of control or console where you have to use the fingers and the hand and the arm to perform these very small operations. So anytime you’re reaching, touching a control, even on a spacesuit you might have small dials. You know, there’s a relationship between the twisting of a small dial and a pinch, rotate action that — that we have in our test. Similarly, the pointing task is analogous to reaching and — and pushing a push button. So, again, you know, we’ve selected these tasks to sort of mimic the kinds of actions that you’d do in a real-world task, and so we believe the results will be useful for other types of interfaces.

Host: Yeah, that’s great, you can — you can design an interface with this human factors capability in mind, maybe the buttons need to be this far apart, maybe they need to, I don’t know, depending on the screens. I don’t know if you guys are working with — now — now, going back to technology a little bit, the — the iPad and tablets and touchscreens is a — is a sort of technology that we want to investigate, and, like you said, they’re using for — for procedures on the International Space Station, mostly like the regular procedures, but there — what about future technologies? What about augmented reality? Is there — is there a fine motor skills where maybe you can point, within your display, you have a certain section you need to point to, and you — and you do it in this augmented reality environment, are there considerations to — for — to bring this study into new technologies?

Kritina Holden: I think probably so. You know, the whole — the next line of research for us in the human factors behavioral performance element is to look towards future deep space missions where crew will not have the luxury of constant contact with mission control. So, right now, they have the ability to talk to them, to get help from them, mission control monitors them for errors, guides them through procedures, does a lot of things that in future missions, the crew may not have the benefit of due to comm delays or even comm blackouts. So they will be operating truly autonomously. For that reason, our new area of focus really is things like you’re describing, the augmented reality, virtual assistance, intelligent systems. We’ve got to be able to provide them with resources, computer-based resources where they no longer have the mission control resources.

Host: You know, a lot of this is thinking, and I probably should have addressed this even earlier, but what’s your background? Are you — are you more of a human factors or psychology, or are you the engineering or computer science side? What’s — what’s your background?

Kritina Holden: So, I started college as a computer science major, and — but I was always interested in psychology, and I finally decided, after three years, that I was much more interested in the people behind the computer than I was writing code for the computer. So, I changed my major and ended up with a degree in psychology. And then I heard about a field that combined computer science and psychology called human factors, and I thought, wow, that — that sounds perfect! That’s — that’s really interesting, so I pursued graduate study in that, and I ended up going to Rice and getting a master’s and PhD in engineering psychology, and different schools have different names for the degrees, but basically it is human factors with an emphasis on human computer interaction.

Host: Alright, well, perfect! You’re — you’re — this is exactly what you’re in, you’re human computer interaction, and in the space environment too, that’s pretty cool!

Kritina Holden: Mhmm. Well, this is something, since I was 8-years-old, I decided I wanted to work at NASA, so, I feel pretty lucky that I’ve been able to spend over 25 years doing just that!

Host: Oh, wow, congratulations! That’s awesome!

Kritina Holden: Thanks!

Host: I guess you knew, going into — that you wanted to work at NASA and you knew you were interested in humans and interested in computers, and let’s just smash those together.

Kritina Holden: Exactly.

Host: Were you exploring other fields in this whole [pause] — I don’t know, college is just a — is an exploratory phase, you know, you got to figure out what — it’s — it’s tough, because you got to figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life, and you have four years to do it. And it’s not like you have four years, because at year four, you’re already — you’re already [laughing] all the way through, you can’t start over. So how’d you — how’d you know that that was something that you wanted to combine?

Kritina Holden: Well, I had always actually been interested in psychology. My dad was a psychologist, and so, I — I was always interested in human behavior, and then as I learned more about computers, I became very interested in how humans perceive information from a computer, how they interact with a computer, and so, finding this field of human factors was just perfect for me, because people who have a background in human computer interaction usually have studied things like, you know, perception and information processing and visual information, things like that. The things that I’m interested in. So, it was just a perfect fit!

Host: Amazing. And some of the work that you’ve done here at NASA is perfectly translatable to something that is absolutely necessary to make — to make missions, human missions, a success. This — the idea of astronauts need to interact with a computer, both in the launch phase and in their day-to-day tasks on orbit. So, I guess I’ll end by saying, Tina, thank you for your contributions to the space program, but also thanks for coming on and just describing what you do in this wonderful world of human versus machine. So, thanks again!

Kritina Holden: Thank you very much!

[ Music & Radio Transmissions ]

Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around! So today we talked with Dr. Kritina Holden about some of the fine motor skills and this idea of human versus machine, I hope you enjoyed it! If you want to learn more about these specific components of human versus machine, you can go to their website, nasa.gov/hrp. They got some great stuff on the human research program, basically how humans — any studies that have to do with humans, particularly aboard the International Space Station. Otherwise, you can get the latest on the ISS at nasa.gov/iss. We also talked about Orion a little bit, some of the vibration elements for that launch. You can get some good information at nasa.gov/orion. There are also some great NASA podcasts out there you can listen to, Gravity Assist, hosted by Dr. Jim Green, that focuses more on planetary science, or you can go listen to NASA in Silicon Valley, those are our friends over at Ames that actually have a lot to do with some of the research that goes aboard the International Space Station, so you can listen to more stories from them.

They’re actually doing some pretty cool stuff on Twitch right now. You can follow us on social media, the International Space Station accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Go to anyone of those accounts and use the hashtag askNASA on your favorite platform to submit an idea or a question for the show. Make sure to mention it’s for Houston, We Have A Podcast, and we may bring it on a future episode! So this broadcast was recorded on February 27th, 2018. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Isidro Reyna, Kathy Reeves, Pat Ryan, and Laurie Abadie. And thanks again to Dr. Tina Holden for coming on the show! We’ll be back next week!