The telemedicine frontier: going the extra mile

Telemedicine has the potential to have a greater impact on the future of medicine than any other modality and will profoundly alter the medical landscape of the twenty-first century. In the most remote areas, it can bring high-quality health care where none is now available. In global health care, it can enhance and standardize the quality of medical care, including developing countries. In the realm of space flight, it can provide a lifeline to medical expertise and monitoring. Through its mobility, it can provide urgently needed health care in instances of natural disaster. However, a number of challenges exist in its coordination and implementation on a global scale, specifically in the international and remote disaster scenarios. In the area of spaceflight, telemedicine capability will remain a consultation/information ‘lifeline’, but additional onboard medical capability and expertise will become crucial complements as missions become more advanced and remote from Earth.     

Safe, reliable, and simplified user access of international space station through process efficiencies

This paper offers an approach and methodology to defining standards, centered on process/product analysis and the premise that an effective process is a good standard. The paper then discusses the role effective processes have in integrating ISS process/product infrastructures into a customer/market focused Integrated Product and Data Environment (IPDE). The paper concludes with a discussion of the integration requirements ISS and future solicitations should consider.     

Radiative damping of gravity waves in the solar atmosphere

The nonlocal character of the radiation field sianificantly modifies the radiative damping of perturbations in the solar photosphere. Gravity waves are not usually considered to exist in the solar photosphere because the radiative damping time, when based on the Newtonian approximation, is too short. However, this restriction does not apply to low order gravity waves. In fact, with the inclusion of nonlocal effects, the radiative damping for low order gravity waves becomes negative for some region in the photosphere and thus acts as a driving mechanism for gravity waves there.     

Integrated Avionics: Past, Present and Future [Society News & Information]

With the advent of integrated avionics in defense and commercial systems in the late 1980s, AESS began to recognize the importance of providing a technical and management sounding board for this emerging technology domain. The panel undertook a series of special studies of interest to the general avionics community. The first study was an assessment of the Air Force's modular avionics systems architecture (MASA) program     

Improvements in Advanced Electronic Navigation Systems

Advanced electronic navigation systems will be required for future merchant ship operations involving minimum crew manning. These systems will rely on some form of electronic chart, which will require continual and timely updating with the latest correction information. This paper describes a newly developed chart correction computer system capable of automatically updating electronic charts via satellite data transfers. The system can provide a direct computer data link between a shipboard computer and the Defense Mapping Agency's Automated Notice to Mariners System.