Aug 25 2015
The Innovative Technology Partnerships Office (ITPO) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, signed a five-year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with YYESIT LLC of Baltimore to co-develop a product that will offer an innovative way to provide monitoring, interpreting and reporting activities against safety and quality protocols, with an initial focus in the area of safety and quality compliance.
YYESIT developed and patented technology that uses visual and auditory recognition for monitoring and tracking a wide variety of actions in a number of different settings, focusing first on healthcare safety and quality.
NASA, particularly the Goddard Software Engineering Division, is seeking to continue to advance its work in the areas of image processing, computer vision, intelligent decision making and optimization between centralized (or ground) and "onboard" payload data processing.
"For NASA, this Technology will support the development of software that will serve as a test bed to validate new methods related to distributed spacecraft missions and to sensor webs," said Jacqueline LeMoigne, Goddard's assistant chief technologist for the Software Engineering Division.
NASA will benefit from the development of the monitoring, interpreting and reporting technology in support of its own internal quality and safety requirements. For example, this technology could be used to track the personnel in a clean room environment to ensure that all safety procedures are followed.
"This agreement will benefit both YYESIT and NASA. This collaborative effort will enable the development of technology that will be usable to improve future NASA science missions utilizing small spacecraft platforms such as CubeSats and SmallSats and also benefit the healthcare sector by improving various quality and safety measures, such as hand washing compliance, required in healthcare and food service industries." said Nona Cheeks, ITPO's office chief at Goddard.
Tony Deasey, YYESIT's CFO said, "YYESIT is very excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with NASA to co-develop our leading edge technology that will dramatically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of video and audio monitoring in a wide variety of settings through reduced reliance on human observers. We are also very excited to have been chosen as a partner for NASA to apply their well tested mission based technologies in a commercial setting and particularly to facilitate their application to improve healthcare outcomes."
Source: http://www.nasa.gov/