The Challenge

As NASA prepares astronauts for more autonomous deep-space missions, understanding their cognitive state during training and operations becomes increasingly important. In isolated environments with limited communication, being able to monitor and anticipate mental focus, workload, and alertness is critical.

To explore this, NASA partnered with Topcoder to crowdsource models that can classify a trainee's current cognitive state—and predict it three seconds ahead— based on high-frequency biometric data from multiple wearable sensors. The goal was to support future mission planning by enabling real-time insights into astronaut mental states, helping improve both training effectiveness and in-mission safety.