How to Design a Space Habitat That Supports its Residents’ Mental Health
hubie writes:
In extreme environments, habitats are built for survival. Submarines, Antarctic bases, and postdisaster dwellings are designed to prioritize health and safety. This is especially the case for habitats in space, where room is at a minimum, contact with Earth is remote, and hazards are numerous.
But as humans plan for longer journeys to the moon and eventually Mars, designing habitats where crews can not only survive but also thrive will be essential to a mission's success.
Now, engineers at MIT and elsewhere are exploring ways that habitats in extreme environments can support a person's mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They have assembled a resource that relates habitat design features with behavioral health outcomes such as stress, anxiety, and feelings of isolation.
Going a step further, the team has visualized these relationships in the form of an interactive online platform. Users can click through to explore connections between design and behavior, such as how a habitat's layout affects social connection and team cohesion, and how a reconfigurable space can minimize homesickness.
"The awareness has been there for some time that living in space is difficult," says Mich Lin, a PhD candidate in the Human Systems Lab and the Engineering Systems Lab at MIT. "We've come a long way from the human in a tin can. As our priorities shift toward long-duration exploration missions, making sure a crew is safe, healthy, happy, and productive becomes even more important."
[...] The researchers modeled their new design tool after a risk mapping format used by NASA. When designing a spacecraft or habitat for astronauts in space, the agency maps out the associated risks in the form of "directed acyclic graphs." A DAG resembles a large web of relationships that illustrate how certain habitat or mission features can affect certain mission-relevant outcomes.
A typical NASA DAG depicts one-way connections between mission constraints, such as "distance from Earth," to an astronaut's physical health outcome, such as quality of sleep, cardiovascular impacts, cognitive function, and so forth.
"By mapping risks, we can identify points of intervention to characterize and mitigate them," Lin explains. "NASA uses DAGs as a countermeasure to the risky business that is human spaceflight."
The researchers looked to create a similar DAG format to map risks associated with habitat design, and less tangible behavioral health outcomes, such as stress, boredom, trust, nostalgia, curiosity, and kinship with crewmates.
"The connection between habitat and behavioral health has not been made in this format before," Lin emphasizes. "So we made those connections for the first time."
[...] The team zeroed in on 14 main emotions or experiences that they considered behavioral outcomes that could be influenced by habitats in extreme environments. These include anxiety, autonomy, nostalgia, curiosity, fatigue, and kinship.
They then carried out a wide-ranging search through the scientific literature to identify studies relating to habitability in extreme environments. For instance, NASA has carried out extensive research on the effects of lighting on sleep, the resetting of circadian rhythms, and productivity. Other studies have investigated circulation and habitat layout and their effects on privacy, social connection, and crew performance.
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