Countermeasure garments are worn by all NASA crew during Earth reentry, landing, and egress to mitigate lower body blood pooling, which can impair a crew member’s ability to complete critical landing tasks. The likelihood of cardiovascular deconditioning increases with mission duration; therefore, countermeasure garments are a critical safeguard to astronaut  
health as we push the bounds of space exploration into 3+ year missions (e.g., Journey to Mars). Current on-body compression technologies are either a mobility hazard, such as tethered, inflatable compression systems, or cumbersome due to their static design, such as undersized, elastic garments. Active-contracting fabrics, specifically shape memory alloy (SMA) knitted actuators, enable an alternative solution – compression garments that can be donned in a loose, relaxed configuration and contract and stiffen in response to small changes in temperature. This work presents a preliminary investigation of the design of an actuating compression garment for astronauts using high force, low temperature actuator fabrics in parallel with passive elastic fabrics to form a mechanically antagonistic wearable system. This mechanically antagonistic wearable system is conceptually defined and built in the form of a prototype calf sleeve with two goals in mind. First, we present the first implementation of a new design methodology and use strategy to observe the functional challenges of this compression garment system. Secondly, we present system performance data to identify areas of the design process that require refinement and/or additional research. The resulting trial run paves the way for future prototype advancements.


Preliminary Investigation of the Design of a Mechanically Antagonistic, Actuating Countermeasure Garment for Astronauts Post-Spaceflight

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace Division

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/SMASIS/SMASIS2020/volume/84027

SMASIS2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.