Design Proposal of Space Clothes that Supports Lives in the Future Space Tourism Era

In a near future, many people will be able to visit and stay in the space hotels easier than now days. In this situation, a novel clothes that fit to the special environment will be required. In this paper, we describe the detail of a prototype of “space clothes”, a new clothes design that could solve the appearance and functionality conditions shown below.Conventional clothes especially skirts and loosely designed shirts are often difficult to be worn in space because it restricts wearer’s motion. On the other hand, such clothes are often preferred by women because of their elegance. The both elegance and functionality must be achieved for the clothes of the future space tourists.All the future space tourists should suffer from space sickness and sunburns by ultraviolet rays. Those issues will worsen the experience in the space. Future clothes for space tourists should be able to solve or be able to mitigate them. Based on these conditions, we developed a prototype of clothes for future space tourists(Figure 1(a)). This clothes is carefully designed to achieve both functionality and elegance. In addition, it embedded with bio-informatics display system to share wearer’s health status among other tourists to enable early initial treatment(Figure 1(b)). We believe that this paper could be a good opportunity to initiate the discussion to clear new market of clothes in space.

Galvanic vestibular stimulation: a novel modulatory countermeasure for vestibular-associated movement disorders

Motion sickness or kinetosis is the result of the abnormal neural output originated by visual, proprioceptive and vestibular mismatch, which reverses once the dysfunctional sensory information becomes coherent. The space adaptation syndrome or space sickness relates to motion sickness; it is considered to be due to yaw, pith, and roll coordinates mismatch. Several behavioural and pharmacological measures have been proposed to control these vestibular-associated movement disorders with no success. Galvanic vestibular stimulation has the potential of up-regulating disturbed sensory-motor mismatch originated by kinetosis and space sickness by modulating the GABA-related ion channels neural transmission in the inner ear. It improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the afferent proprioceptive volleys, which would ultimately modulate the motor output restoring the disordered gait, balance and human locomotion due to kinetosis, as well as the spatial disorientation generated by gravity transition.