[imagesource: NASA]

There’s a lot of talk about finding a way for humans to live in space.

Elon Musk has grand plans for sustaining life on Mars, and NASA’s successful landing of the Perseverance Mars rover is being hailed as the first step towards making that happen.

Perseverance is one link in a chain of projects designed to figure out how to get to the Red Planet and potentially set up shop there.

The Artemis Program is also underway, preparing the first astronauts for that eventual journey, starting with a test run on the moon.

A major hindrance to these plans is that we aren’t actually designed to live outside of Earth’s atmosphere.

The results of a study on the effects of space on the body, released in 2019, showed that after a year of living in space, astronaut Scott Kelly’s carotid artery got thicker. He also experienced DNA damage, gene expression changes, shifts in gut microbes, reduced cognitive abilities, and a structural change at the ends of chromosomes called telomeres.

Oh, and his eyeballs changed shape.

Another common effect of space travel is hearing loss, and to find a solution to this problem, studies need to be done, which is why NASA turned to Joburg-based company, eMoyo.

This weekend past, eMoyo’s KUDUwave Pro TMP audiometer was launched from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia aboard the S.S. Katherine Johnson, a Northrop Grumman NG CRS-15 mission to the International Space Station (ISS):

The KUDUwave is a medically certified portable and boothless audiometer, used in the testing and diagnosis of auditory related deficiencies.

The fully certified KUDUwave Pro TMP was packed as a manifested piece of space hardware and will be used in the inaugural On-Orbit Hearing Assessment. In other words, it will be used to test astronaut’s hearing in space, and in doing so gather valuable data.

This is an incredible contribution from a South African company to human space flight and space medicine.

Here’s what eMoyo had to say about it:

Taking the KUDUwave to space was one of our dreams for many years. We had to create our own luck. The way we created it was to publish medical journal articles in the USA, work with USA universities and attend conferences in the USA.

Image: KUDUwave Pro, eMoyo

Eventually, we were introduced to members of the Johnson Space Center by the president of a prominent Journal on Audiology in the USA. We visited them a few times and then we got the good news that we were on the shortlist.

The technology was tested over a period of three years, following which they heard that they had been selected, just a few days before the launch.

Slight modifications were made to facilitate self-testing in the space station by the crew members.

The device is almost entirely homegrown right down to the idea behind it.

“We injection mould the plastic parts in South Africa, pick-and-place the PCBs at our manufacturing facility in Northcliff, Johannesburg and we assemble, calibrate and quality certify the KUDUwave in our manufacturing facility. Of course, the resistors and capacitors and micro speakers we use as components are not South African, but anything that can be South African is South African. Even the invention is South African.”

A robust, small, portable, easy to use, boothless high-frequency audiometer was needed and since the KUDUwave is the only audiometer of it’s kind, it was the obvious choice for a mission to the ISS.

A proudly South African step in the field of space exploration.

You can learn more about eMoyo’s revolutionary technology here.

[source:emoyo]