Photos: PDAs in space

Astronauts living on the International Space Station (ISS) will soon be using PDAs to help them with a variety of on-board tasks.

One intended use is the PDA Depressurisation Program (PDP), which is activated in the event of depressurisation and computes the time left before astronauts have to abandon the space station.

It then uses speech synthesis to notify crew members about the time remaining before they have to jump ship.

The PDP - which has been developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) - was tested by astronaut Thomas Reiters on the ISS from July to December 2006, and will become part of the standard set of software packages loaded on each PDA for ESA astronauts.

Using PDAs as a voice or speech processing platform to get astronauts chatting to each other and the ISS' computer systems is another - less frightening - application under consideration at ESA.

It is envisaged that crew-to-crew comms will combine wireless communication systems with VoIP, and the crew-to-system contact would be via speech synthesis and voice recognition software.

Photo credit: ESA