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some of the most common skills we use on

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earth prove to be much more tedious in

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microgravity but they are skills that

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astronauts must be able to master as we

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journey farther into space an experiment

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called fine motor skills is the first to

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measure long-term microgravity exposure

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different phases of adaptation and

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sensory motor recovery after returning

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to earth my colleague laurie meggs at

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the marshall space flight center in

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huntsville alabama spoke with christina

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holden the principal investigator of

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this study to learn more

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we're interested in finding out if there

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are any effects of long-duration

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microgravity on fine motor skills

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we're particularly interested in looking

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at advanced technologies like touch

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screens and gesture devices because we

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think those are the kind of devices that

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crew members will be using on future

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missions and we want to make sure that

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if they're on a long duration journey to

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mars for example that they're able to

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interact accurately with those devices

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once they go to the planet surface what

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types of fine motor skills are we

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talking about

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so we are doing the study on a apple

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ipad and using the touch screen and so

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we have four different tasks that are

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part of the investigation they include

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things like pointing to a target

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dragging to a target shape tracing a

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circle in square shape tracing and then

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a pinch rotate task which is a

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multi-touch task for the touch screen

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why do we need to know this

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well so

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crew members more and more are using

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ipads on board iss and

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so they're using a lot of touch screen

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interfaces and a lot of times if

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interfaces aren't designed well

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there are a lot of errors and so we want

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to make sure we know if there's any

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performance decrements after being in

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microgravity for a long time that we

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might need to accommodate with a

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different type of design

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would this lead to new designs for our

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ipads yes we're very excited about that

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actually the particular application we

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think it has is for populations who do

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have problems with fine motor skills so

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we're looking into using the test

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battery that we've developed for

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elderly populations or brain injured or

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parkinson's patients

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who need to be tested you know it could

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be used as a diagnostic tool we also

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think it could be used as a

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rehabilitation tool

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that's really cool it's really cool

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we have a couple of universities that

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are very interested in working with us

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to kind of move the product in that

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direction

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so have you done other studies like this

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we've done a number of ground studies

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looking at fine motor skills but this is

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really the first flight study that we've

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done pretty exciting that you can do it

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for a year right it is so exciting you

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know we come from human factors and we

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don't get to do a lot of flight studies

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and so we are thrilled to be part of the

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one year mission this is a really a

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great opportunity to complete a data set

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that is a little bit lacking so there's

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been some data in the past on fine motor

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skills

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not interacting with the kind of devices

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that we're using but also um with a lot

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of lapses in the data you know over the

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mission and so this is a great

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opportunity for us to get data

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pre-flight throughout a whole one-year