NASA SBIR 2008 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Traclabs, Inc.
100 N.E. Loop 410 Suite 520
San Antonio, TX 78216 - 4727
(210) 822-2310

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Debra Schreckenghost
schreck@traclabs.com
1012 Hercules
Houston, TX 77058 - 2722
(281) 461-7884

Expected Technology Readiness Level (TRL) upon completion of contract: 3 to 4

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
Incidents related to impaired human performance in space operations can be caused by environmental conditions, situational challenges, and operational deficiencies. Detecting, reporting, and correlating related incidents are key to preventing future incidents. NASA has made significant progress in standardizing the reporting of space incidents by developing electronic data entry and storage of information. While such information technology improves report consistency, incident data are not represented in a way that enables advanced computer-based reasoning about incidents. TRACLabs proposes to develop a human factors incident-reporting tool for authoring and utilizing human factors incident data. This project is innovative in combining semantic web technologies with automated assistive technologies to aid users in finding relationships among incidents. The semantic indexing provided by the use of incident reporting language permits more sophisticated search of archives. During Phase I we defined a semantic language for incident reporting in XML and designed a technology approach for authoring and utilizing incident reports represented in this language. In Phase II we will implement this software and evaluate its effectiveness for the space human factors community at JSC. At the end of Phase II, software for reporting space human factors incidents will be delivered to NASA.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
Incident reporting is an important part of handling issues that arise during space operations. NASA missions currently report flight incidents using approaches such as the Problem Reporting and Corrective Action (PRACA) process for Shuttle and Station, Shuttle In-Flight Anomaly (IFA) reports, and Station Items for Investigation (IFI). The semantic language and tools for incident reporting TRACLabs is developing are complementary but not duplicative with these approaches. They are intended to support user groups that have information needs not well addressed by programmatic incident reporting systems. For example, the space human factors organization needs to track incidents related to human factors and habitability issues not captured in current incident archives. We use semantic web technologies to embed domain semantics in incident data and utilize these semantics to improve database search and reporting. The software is customized by defining new domain semantics or adding XML tags for special domain needs.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
Commercial tools for incident reporting are available in a diverse range of domains from crime incidents to corporate security incidents to customer complaints. Like the proposed software, most of these products support electronic submission and reporting of incident data, and archival of incident reports. The proposed approach differs from these commercial tools in providing a semantic basis for customization and improved search, and in representing incidents in an XML-based language. Such capabilities permit applying much of the incident reporting software developed for NASA in non-NASA applications. Promising applications include reporting incidents arising in chemical and nuclear plants, such as incidents arising from human error during plant operations, and reporting medical incidents, such as incidents that arise when monitoring the aged or impaired in performing the activities of daily living.

NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING

Autonomous Reasoning/Artificial Intelligence Database Development and Interfacing Human-Computer Interfaces