The Astronaut Psychology Dashboard (APD) is a design concept for a software application to monitor the physical and mental health of astronauts (and astronaut teams) on long-duration space missions. It is meant to provide feedback, monitoring, and exercises to improve each metric concerned. The Astronaut Psychology Dashboard is an attempt to answer the question “What tool would help create the ultimate team?” It distills the best research in team psychology into a single interface, and makes that interface fun and easy to use.

1. The Astronaut Psychology Dashboard
Mike A. Morrison (morri640@msu.edu)
WHYWHAT DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
The Astronaut Psychology Dashboard (APD) is a design concept
for a software application to monitor the physical and mental
health of astronauts (and astronaut teams) on long-duration
space missions.
It is meant to provide feedback, monitoring, and exercises
to improve each metric concerned.
The Astronaut Psychology Dashboard is an attempt to answer the
question “What tool would help create the ultimate team?”
It distills the best research in team psychology into a single interface,
and makes that interface fun and easy to use.
In 2015, NASA surveyed 15 former astronauts and asked
them to identify which skills were crucial to the success of
long-duration space missions. This survey resulted in a list of
18 skills, ranked from most important to least. Of these skills,
the “Top 6” were the following (parentheses contain the
percentage of former astronauts who deemed that skill
important): 1. Self-Care Skills (95%), 2. Technical Skills (94%),
3. Small Group Living Skills (94%), 4. Judgement (93%),
5. Motivation (92%), 6. Teamwork Skills (92%)
Astronauts are busy, and they don’t like being forced to use stuff that
psychologists tell them they “should” use. With this in mind, the APD is
designed to be fun, engaging, and useful enough that astronauts will use it
daily because they want to.
Many features in the dashboard are designed to utilize data collected
automatically and unobtrusively through the sociometric badges created
by Michigan State University (as well as other sensors), and thus these
features can function and stay updated without requiring any additional
input (conscious effort) from crew members.
I thank NASA for their support in developing this project (NNX13AM77G and NNX16AR52G, S.W.J. Kozlowski, Principal Investigator).
The Small Group and Team Skills Dashboard (SGTS) modules are designed to gamify the process of
getting to know other crew members, forming shared team mental models, and building transactive
memory (i.e.,“who knows what?”), all of which aid team functioning and communication.
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Mission Day
0
20
40
60
Chris & Mae
Chris & Scott
Chris & Sally
Chris & Vlad
Interactions
Crew Interactions Graph
Team Effectiveness Graph
This module proposes to track an aggregate reading of team effectiveness
across mission days, marking inflection points clearly, and using natural language
analysis of mission diaries to help identify and investigate into critical events.
A way to see, at-a-glance which crew members interact most (or least)
with each other.
Scoreboard
The scoreboard awards points for learning about other crew members,
and places each crew member’s‘team game’score on a scoreboard
to encourage healthy competition.
Interpersonal Facts Game
This mini-game prompts crew members to answer questions
about the backgrounds and personal interests of other crew
members to boost interpersonal knowledge and liking.
This mini-game prompts crew members to quickly (under time pressure)
associate specific skills with crew members who possess them.
Skill Match Game
These modules summarize for a crew member their relationships with
their fellow teammates, including: quantity of interactions with each
person, emotions towards that person (drawn from analysis of natural
language), sharedness of mental models (how much you are“on the same
page”with that person), interpersonal knowledge, and an option to learn
more about each crew member.
Crewmate Relationship Tracking
Crew Emotions Game
Sleep Hygiene
Body Fat
Sleep
Upper Body Strength
Endurance
Lower Body Strength
Improve Your Sleep
Emotions Today
Daily Mood (over the whole mission)
Joy
Sadness
Fear
Anger
Disgust
8am 9am 10am 11am 12pm 1pm 2pm 3pm
Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10 Day 11 Day 12 Day 13 Day 14 Day 15
Fun thing to try...
Throw a paper airplane.
Suggested by...
Lt. Jim McConnell
Inflection Point: Mission Day 8
Things you talked about on day 8...
Events/Issues Sentiment
Breakfast
Houston check-in
EVA Malfunction
Lunch
Exercise
+100%
+89%
+22%
-80%
+10%
Dave
Susie
Jim
EVA
Game of Thrones
SELF CARE SMALL GROUP AND TEAM SKILLS
The Sleep Hygiene module proposes to compare automatically-collect-
ed data about body movements, air temperature, light, noise, and
sleep/wake times against best practices in sleep hygiene research.
The Self Care Dashboard mirrors a typical“FitBit”dashboard, but pro-
poses to automatically track and incentivize many more exercises and
health metrics (e.g., muscle strength, sleep hygiene). The Self Care Dash-
board also very notably incorporates mental health monitoring and ex-
ercises as well.
The Crew Emotions Game displays a picture of a certain
crew member making a genuine facial expression. The goal
of the game is to correctly guess the emotion behind the
facial expression, so crew members can learn to more quick-
ly identify their teammates’emotions.
Self Care Dashboard
Physical Health
Mental Health
Sleep Hygiene
7.5hrs
Total Time
5/5
Sleep Quality
80%
Sleep Efficiency
Wakefulness
Light
Sound
Hours of sleep Sleep goals... Sleep hygiene checklist...
6 hours per night (based on
your DNA)
Sleep efficiency over 80%
Consistent bed time
Consistent wakeup time
Dark in the room
Cool in room
Last 7 Days
Last Night
Your sleep last night (and stuff that may have affected it)
Crewmate Relationships
Team Effectiveness
26
interactions
19
interactions
11
interactions
10
interactions
Sharedness of
Mental Models
Sharedness of
Mental Models
Sharedness of
Mental Models
Personal Facts
Known
Personal Facts
Known
Personal Facts
Known
Personal Facts
Known
Sharedness of
Mental Models
78/120
98/114
110/122
125/125
What is Melissa’s favorite book?
Catcher in the Rye Atlas Shrugged Sense and Sensibility Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Get to know Melissa
better
Get to know Rick
better
Get to know Mark
better
Get to know Alex
better
Potential issue with Mark
at 9:32am on Tuesday about “the reactor”
There wasn’t a conflict Tips on resolving conflicts with Mark We worked it out I think! Repress
Potential Conflicts
* Photos of former astronauts and movie astronauts are for example purposes only. All images from The Martian are copyright 20th Century Fox.
Quick! Who has sewing skills?!
The Person Game!
Crew Emotions Game
What is Mark’s favorite
book?
Catcher in the Rye
Atlas Shrugged
Sense and Sensibility
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
How is Commander Lewis
feeling right now?
Angry about what was just said.
Considering variables in a problem.
Neutral - She’s watching TV
Annoyed at this whole situation.