Kinesiology team earns fifth win in NASA-sponsored design challenge

Nov. 15, 2024 — DENTON — When it comes to space flight challenges, Texas Woman’s kinesiology students always seem to have the best solutions.

For the fifth time in the last seven years, a team of Texas Woman’s undergraduate kinesiology students took the top overall prize at a NASA-sponsored statewide design competition. 

The Texas Woman’s team, dubbed Team Pleiades, was the only kinesiology department and the only all-female team represented at the two-day competition, which wrapped up Nov. 14 just outside of Houston. The majority of the 19 college teams in the competition are engineering students. 

“It’s a huge bonus to have an all-female group with a STEM focus,” said Rhett Rigby, interim director of the School of Health Promotion and Kinesiology and the design team’s faculty advisor. “It was the only health-focused project … ours had one of the most direct applications, most direct connections, to life in space.” 

The first-place finish continues a successful run for TWU’s School of Health Promotion and Kinesiology’s internship team. Teams have won the competition four times in the last seven semesters, including last year’s fall team. Over the last 13 semesters that Texas Woman’s teams have entered the competition, they’ve finished in the top four 11 times.

For the last three years, TWU teams have focused on the topic of mitigating muscle atrophy in long-duration space flight for their projects at the Texas Space Grant Consortium Design Challenge. This semester’s team discovered new ways to address the loss of skeletal muscle mass in astronauts, specifically in the lower limbs. 

Their solution was to design and test a compact blood flow restriction device that can be implemented during resistance training workouts in microgravity. 

In addition to the overall first-place finish, the five seniors took first place in peer review and presentation and second place in the poster/best model category. Team members Erin Rocha (team lead), Hannah Schnettler, Karolyn Skoby, Josey Salazar and Makiyah Brittmon received scholarships from TSGC for their project. 

“To have a showing like this, I’m incredibly proud of the team,” said Rigby. “They’ve put in thousands of hours worth of work to this combined, and it’s nice to see the fruits of their labor come to fruition.” 

The TSGC Design Challenge gives students an opportunity to come up with a solution to help solve a research objective of importance to NASA. Teams have an option of choosing their own space-related challenge, and the last several TWU teams have gone that route, honing in on the muscle deterioration.

Lengthy space flights wreak havoc on astronauts’ muscle health. Weight-bearing skeletal muscles, such as the quadriceps and soleus, are especially prone to atrophy because of their larger size. The TWU team cited research that shows there is a 20% decrease in the size of these muscles in the first five to 11 days of space flight.

The Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 teams created exercise devices for astronauts to use in space flight. This semester’s team created a blood-flow restriction device (nicknamed HALO for Hypertrophic Aide by Limb Occlusion) uniquely designed for resistance training in space flight.

Blood-flow restriction is a technique that uses a cuff to partially reduce blood flow to a limb by applying pressure to major leg and arm arteries while exercising. It is used in physical therapy rehabilitation to help people train or recover from injuries. When using this method, users exercise at a low intensity level, mimicking the effects of a high intensity workout.

TWU’s prototype resembles a large blood pressure cuff. Instead of being strapped to your arm, this cuff would go on the upper thigh. Other components of the device include an airbag, a Direct Current motor, rechargeable battery, motor board and microcontroller. The team coded the HALO device to inflate the airbag to the desired pressure in order to achieve the partial reduced blood flow. 

With this device, astronauts could lift smarter, not harder. While exercising, they would be creating oxygen deprived muscles, which would stimulate muscle gain with lower weights. This lower load is also less impactive on joints while also lowering recovery times and enhancing muscle recovery.

“It’s a bit surreal to take teams with no prior experience in some of these areas related to engineering and within a few months, we are able to compete at the highest undergraduate level,” Rigby said.