 Welcome to this edition of NASA Images. I'm Lynn Bondrant. During this show, we're focusing on historic NASA footage showing down-to-earth uses of space technology. Our first clip from early 1973 shows how a Moonrock analyzer benefits medicine. This ambulance arriving at a hospital in Boston has something in common with these astronauts collecting lunar samples on the moon. The two come together as a result of the work being done here, a chemistry lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When unconscious patients without medical identification arrive at Boston hospitals, blood samples or other body fluids are sent to the MIT lab. Using sophisticated equipment, researchers are able to tell if the patient has had an overdose of drugs or other poisons. The procedure takes two hours. In the past, two days was not uncommon. The new technique can determine which of several hundred drugs the patient may have taken. NASA originally purchased a mass spectrometer set up for us as part of the project to analyze rocks brought back from the Moon. Since this equipment was available to us here in the laboratory, we decided to utilize it for the purpose of analyzing body fluids and has worked out very well for this purpose also. Dr. Catherine Costello is responsible for the hospital project at MIT. We do samples on an emergency basis 24 hours a day on call for any hospital which requests such an analysis. There is no charge to the hospital's for this service. We asked Dr. Costello to describe the analysis process. If the sample which we receive is blood, then it must first be centrifuged. This separates the heavier red blood cells from the serum layer which will contain the drug and which we analyze. After it's placed in the centrifuge, the upper layer contains the serum and this is removed and placed into a small separatory funnel. Solvent is then added to this funnel and after it shakes, it's separated and the drugs or drug metabolites will be contained in the lower layer which is the organic solvent. This is then removed and brought down to a very small volume with a rotary evaporator. This concentrated solution is then ready for analysis by the instrumental setup. A small amount of this is injected into the gas chromatograph which now separates this complex mixture into single components. These pass directly into the mass spectrometer where the analysis is done and a fingerprint pattern is obtained for each compound. Now the computer is printing out the results of its search and what will give us is a list of the drugs which this person has ingested. So far it's found that he has had methadone and now it also appears that he's ingested the drug methacolone. The computer system used originally to search for organic compounds on the moon was developed by Dr. Klaus Beeman, professor of chemistry at MIT. I think it is worthwhile to point out that this is an excellent example where basic research conducted in a university laboratory and supported by various governmental agencies, in this case the NASA and the National Institute of Health has contributed to the generation of an instrumental system that can be used for the benefit of the general public in this case to help individuals that for one reason or another are in an emergency situation and need help rapidly, reliably, and cheaply. Poon Rock Analyzer, giving doctors a new diagnostic tool. Our next historic clip from 1974 shows how space sensors help children with cerebral palsy. Body sensors used in studies for space flight at NASA's Ames Research Center in California are now being put to good use at the Children's Hospital, Stanford University. Marty, these are electrodes that I'm going to put in your tennis shoes. The purpose? To better understand and acquire more precise measurements of the walking patterns of youngsters with cerebral palsy. We have the beginnings of a data analysis laboratory which we're going to study children with cerebral palsy the way they walk and the way their muscles act during walking. We want to know which muscles are acting during stance and that's when the child's foot is on the ground and we want to know which muscles are working during swing and that's when the child's foot is in the air. Fran Ford is an orthopedic research associate at the Children's Hospital. The young man she is working with is three-and-one-half-year-old Marty Malare. Toe up. Okay. That's where your muscle is. So that's the place we'll test. You know, you could help me if you'd like. See these blue tabs? You can pull this off the paper for me because I'll need one pretty soon. Marty, these are the surface electrodes that we're going to put on you. They're going to tell me what your muscles are doing as you're walking. Those little modules are like radio stations. Can you see my antenna over there? Ms. Ford asked NASA engineers for help after experiencing problems with the test equipment she had been using. It tells Dr. Black good things about you, okay? Before the children were directly cabled into the machinery. In other words, a wire went from the surface electrodes right over across the floor and into the machinery itself. This creates a great deal of fear within the child because he's connected to a machine. Also, children with cerebral palsy have great balance problems and having the wires trailing along behind, adding excess weight, also created many, many problems with their balance. So I don't feel that I was getting a true reading from their muscles. I need to find out where your muscle was back here. So I want you to push your foot down. Point it down toward the ground. That's right. Very good. Do it again. Push really hard. Down toward the ground. Now connect your... Tiny impulses from Marty's leg muscles are transmitted via the sensors through a radio transmitter, which he wears around his waist, to this receiver recorder. Man, we have to wait a second. Look at all the squiggle lines your muscles are making. Isn't that fantastic? Your muscles are so strong that they're going off my paper. This is the action potential from Marty's muscles. As you can see, there's some who are continuously active, some are active intermittently. Here it's off. This is all timed with his foot sequence, his stance and his swing phases. Using pre-amplifiers, surface electrodes, and cabling already developed for NASA, Fran Ford began getting good test results in her own work. We think the equipment, the test in itself and the equipment helps the youngsters by teaching them more about their body, not just giving us data that we can put in an article for the classifier and the research. He teaches them more which muscles are acting as he's walking and which muscles are quiet as he's walking. And he can try and more control this to make his walk more like a normal person's walk would be. The equipment should also prove useful to others. Very definitely useful. In fact, we hope to have this equipment so simplified that many therapists, untrained therapists can use this equipment out in the, say, crippled children's schools all over the state of California or all over the United States. That's so that the children don't have to be sent into a medical center. They don't have to leave their parents or make a long journey into the centralized location for this kind of testing. That's trikes and flexes. What is that? No, we could do that. We certainly are being a big boy. I mean, very cooperative. Another use for space technology may affect bridge safety as this 1974 clip shows. There are nearly half a million bridges in this country. Although infrequently, they do occasionally collapse causing injury and death. Such was the case on December 15, 1967 when the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia collapsed from a structural defect and fell into the Ohio River. Forty-eight people lost their lives. Some surveillance technique such as is represented by Random Deck could very well have foretold the structural failure before it happened. And that's exactly what we're trying to do with Random Deck. We want to be able to keep very close track or a lot closer track than has been possible in the past of the structural integrity of bridges. Horace Emerson is in the Office of Technology Utilization at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. The Random Deck technique is a means of obtaining random vibrational inputs to a structure such as this bridge that I'm standing near and processing those signals through an analyzer to obtain a signature for the structure. Now, that signature won't change with time unless something happens to the structure itself, or the bridge. Tinting accelerometers that sense vibrations in NASA wind tunnels are used along with a computer for analysis. The joint study with the Federal Highway Administration is an attempt to find out if the technique is feasible for use on bridges all over the U.S. Horace Emerson describes how the tests are made. Well, we started out here with the portable equipment that we need in the back of a station wagon, and then the engineers climb up the hill and affix the accelerometers to studs that have been previously glued to the structural members of the bridge. This has two advantages. One, you don't damage the bridge at all, and you can always go back to the exact same location with your accelerometer. Then the wire that will carry the signal from the accelerometer is attached to the accelerometer and carried back down the hill and plugged into the tape recording equipment. Dr. Robert Reed of Nielsen Engineering and Research is making the on-site measurements. Here we have a portable oscilloscope which actually shows the vibration that's occurring on the bridge. When a car comes over the bridge, here comes a small car now. You'll see a burst of vibration. Yeah, the car is above us. When the tape recorder is brought back from the bridge, the data is played back through our analysis equipment, which we can see on the... And recall, also of Nielsen Engineering, processes the bridge data through the random-deck computer. The signature forms here, and each time you see it flash, it means that a car or truck is passing over the bridge. Now, as this signature forms, it will take a definite shape, and we can compare that when it's complete with a signature taken from a previous month. Now, when we overlap the signature from this month and the one from last month, we notice that there are no changes. However, if changes did occur, then we would have to go back to the bridge and inspect it more thoroughly. It would look like this if there were a crack or other structural problems on the bridge. Today, bridges are visually inspected. In the future, these same bridges may be reliably and inexpensively monitored for structural defects, long before damage occurs, using techniques from aeronautics and space research. In another clip, we see how a quadriplegic is aided by a space device. An electronic device designed originally to activate controls in a spacecraft, in case astronauts lost the use of their limbs, is now being used at Jackson Memorial Hospital Miami and other places by people like 18-year-old George Cunningham. George was injured playing football on November 21, 1973. As a result, he's paralyzed from the neck down. New life, as it is called, is built by scientific systems international and combines two small video display screens and a miniature computer. With a huff and a puff, George can do for himself what others had to do before. There's a panel here with 19 different things I can do. And on the left side, I have different numbers. Okay, on the right side, the 19 different things are called channels. Now, to pick a channel, I inhale on this thing. Like, I'm going to number two. I inhaled when it was on zero, and then the numbers flashed by, and I inhaled on two. Now, to work it, I blow to get the dial tone. And it's on zero. And I blow on zero to start the numbers. And I blow on the number I want. Now, when somebody answers, I just talk into the phone. Hello, Connie? Yeah. This is George. Hi. Hi, Evan. Hi, how are you? Fine. Are you coming to the hospital tonight? Yeah, I'll be there. What time can you get here? Is it eight o'clock? No. Visiting hours are over at eight thirty. Could you make it around seven? Yeah. All right, see you then. Okay, bye-bye. I just blow to hang up. George can control the volume on his TV set the same way. Now, inhale again, until it gets to number four. And that's the volume. And then I blow. You could turn it up. If I could blow again, it'll turn it down. To call a nurse, that's number one on my channel box. All I do is inhale until it gets to one. Inhale again, and then blow. The nurse's light goes on. Yes, it's coming in. Can I help you? All right, when you get a minute, can you give me a glass of water, please? Sure, I'll be in in just a minute. All right, thank you. And then I can go and turn my radio on. By inhaling, wait until it gets to five. Inhaling again, then blowing. And that turns it on. And then I can change stations by blowing. And eventually I can just turn it off. I keep blowing. And I inhale again, and I blow. That light behind me should go on. Young Cunningham can even open and close the curtains in his room. We asked George if being able to do things for himself had changed his outlook. Definitely. I think it gives me an idea of what I can do when I get out of here. I can do many things with the telephone companies hiring people. I can do different recordings and stuff like that. And it'll help me with college. With the help of a device developed for use by astronauts in space, quadriplegics and others with great physical problems are being aided in their struggle for rehabilitation. NASA spin-offs have been used to help amputees, too. The releasing mechanism that holds Saturn rockets on the pad until the engines reach full thrust and high-purity carbon lining the engine nozzles are now being used in a pilot program to make better-fitting, quick-releasing artificial legs and arms. Here, a test to check the release mechanism that will be used in launching the American half of next year's joint U.S.-Soviet link-up in space. Three, two, one. March of last year, a doctor from Rancho Los Amigos Hospital visited us to tell us about the work on the bow-compatible carbon. After the formal presentation... Les Owens is a design engineer at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. During this, the doctor asked if we could not use our experience on disconnects to come up with a simple, easy way to connect an artificial limb to the stub of an amputee. Something would allow dispensing of all the former trappings such as straps and belts. We used our experience and came up with a prototype like this for a leg attachment. One of the problems of designing a device which has no precedence in use is that unusual designs have to be used in terms of the equipment. Dr. Virt Mooney is chief of the amputee center, Rancho Los Amigos Hospital, Los Angeles. Representatives of NASA installations and the people at Kennedy Space Center heard us describe our difficulty in achieving a connector system. Apparently, this is a problem which they had solved nicely for connective systems to their umbilical lines with the space shots, and they presented their ability to solve this for us, which indeed they did, and they have manufactured the connector system in the metallic implant. We did the general design work as to what we needed, and they very nicely accomplished the solution of it. To better illustrate, this is an exact replica of what was used in the first Operation Rancho Los Amigos in March. This portion was implanted in the lower leg of the patient, and this portion is being built into the artificial limb to attach. It will attach very simply and release simply. In less than six months, engineers built an inexpensive, scaled-down version of the quick-release mechanism. Parts made at the Kennedy Space Center include a special shock-absorbing rubber isolator cast and vulcanized in the rubber and plastics land. The steel shaft that is eventually implanted into the bone. Attached to the metal shaft and protruding through the skin is a small high-purity carbon button. The type of carbon developed for use in the space program. The body doesn't reject carbon as it does other materials. Here, surgeons at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital prepare to implant the steel shaft and carbon button into the lower leg of an amputee patient. Although it will be a while before the technique is made available for general clinical use, doctors are optimistic about this space hardware that makes snap-on artificial limbs a reality. Our final historical documentary report goes back to 1974 as did all but the first of our films during the show. This report documents how space technology was used to improve a heart pacemaker. Now, here's the report. The ratio. Since July 1973, Jennifer has been using a unique rechargeable pacemaker to increase her heart rate from slow to near normal. She joins some 60,000 other Americans who have heart pacemakers implanted every year. Developed by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the pacemaker makes use of power cells originally used aboard satellites in space. It is half the thickness and one-third the volume of earlier models and can be painlessly recharged from outside the body for 20 years. This eliminates the need for surgery every two years to remove and replace batteries. Mrs. Kathleen Garascio tells what the new device has meant to her daughter Jennifer. It's meant a lot because since Jennifer's had the pacemaker there's been a complete change in her. She's grown in size. She's acting very normal. Before, she really couldn't play or keep up with the other children. It also means a great deal to us knowing that she doesn't have to be operated on every two years. And also the size of it that is small enough for her. The other pacemakers were quite large. What the pacemaker does is send an electrical impulse to the heart, speeding up Jennifer's heartbeat from a slow rate of 40 to a normal 72 beats a minute. And normal she is. She does nearly everything a healthy youngster can do and especially enjoys playing with her brothers, cousins, and friends. It's different for only 90 minutes a week when she recharges the pacemaker batteries. Pacemaker's charger is very simple. It's convenient enough to carry. You can take it anywhere necessary to charge her. It's also very good. If we were on a week's vacation, we wouldn't have to take it with us. If you miss a week, you can catch up on it, but there'd be no harm to Jennifer if we should not do it. The charging head is not meeting up. It lets us know that it's not charging. When it stops, the green light goes on and that means that she's being charged. And when the whole charging period is finished, a blue light goes on and lets us know that it's the end of the charge. This means that she's charged for another week and we won't have to do it until next week. Ask Mrs. Garaccio about the outlook for Jennifer's future. The outlook for Jennifer's future is very good. The doctors say that she can live to be a ripe old age and she could grow up to be anything she wants to be. The basic concept for the long-life battery in Jennifer's pacemaker has been proven in over 10 years of space use. A good example of technology for space now being used to help people. That's all for this edition of NASA Images. But before we go, I'd like to invite you to stop by and visit our visitor center here at the NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland and enjoy the many displays that are here. Until next time, this is Lynn Bonderant saying goodbye from the NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.