Crew health status and monitoring summary: the second manned Skylab mission.
We have attempted to show that objective data used to assess crew health comes to the responsible physicians from the laboratories of the experimenters in sporadic and overwhelming amounts, but rarely in the real-time or near real-time frame which is preferred. The crew surgeon generates little hard data by his own efforts. Because of these factors, whenever an over-all clinical assessment of a particular crewman's fitness to continue a mission is an immediate necessity, it must too often be given on what the clinician would consider less than adequate data. Beginning on MD 28, weekly conferences were held with senior NASA management to make a "Go" or "No-Go" recommendation to continue or terminate the mission. In the absence of absolute indications of an unacceptable declining crew health, a clinical judgment was required. To tighten the criteria for decision-making, the authors selected factors that seemed indicative of overall health and plotted them both as real-time and percentage changes from preflight means. Other plots of the most readily available real-time and near real-time data were also developed for this purpose. The major success of this effort was the initiation of a method which indicated interesting and worthwhile possibilities if continued, refined, and computerized for more rapid availability. Correlation of actual post-flight findings with results anticipated from this method was gratifying but not statistically defensible. Whether or not this method would have forewarned of a serious decrement in crewmen's health cannot be known because, in fact, they were healthy and remain healthy.