You always enjoy shopping. This trip includes a stop at the pharmacy in a drugstore to pick up a prescription medicine. While you wait for the medicine, a woman sits down at a special machine. She places her arm through a cloth and presses a button. The cloth begins to inflate around her arm. After about a minute, she smiles as she pulls her arm out of the cuff.

You ask her about the machine. She tells you that the machine measured her blood pressure and let her know everything is fine. She also tells you we can thank NASA for this kind of equipment. You aren't sure what NASA has to do with blood pressure measuring equipment but you plan to find out.

It's easy to find information on the Internet about how NASA helps doctors - and patients. The information you find first is about the equipment your mother used in the drugstore. NASA invented a special device that inflates, with the push of a button, to measure an astronaut's blood pressure in a way that does not require the astronaut to do anything with the equipment. It was first used in 1961 with our first astronaut, Alan Shepard.

The next stop on your internet search is the description of how NASA developed technology that helps doctors see more clearly inside a person's body. You may have broken a bone and had X-rays taken to see the bone. X-rays work well for this kind of injury. Sometimes, more detail is needed. In the mid-1960s, NASA used special computer technology that made Moon pictures become even clearer to look at. Today, doctors use this technology with CATScan and MRI equipment. A CATScan uses X-rays that go into the body from many different directions rather than from just one like a normal X-ray. MRI machines use a magnetic field and radio waves to create an image. MRIs work best for looking at organs in the body, while CATScans look at bone.

The next internet story you see describes taking a person's temperature. Someone takes a temperature reading in a hospital or doctor's office two billion times every year. NASA can measure the temperature of objects in space - such as planets and stars - without leaving Earth. This method is now used in thermometers that are placed into the ear's opening for as little as two seconds. A sensor measures the infrared (heat) waves and records them as a temperature reading. They are accurate and easier to use than thermometers placed in the mouth. It certainly makes it easier when you need to know a baby's temperature!

Some of you reading this report are wearing glasses. You know how easy it can be for your glasses to get scratched. NASA helped invent a material that protects satellites and their camera lenses from getting scratched easily if something touches them in space. Lenses in glasses can be coated with this same material. The lenses in the satellites' camera also use another technology that stops bright light from making a reflection on the lens that is hard to see through.

Another technology provides optometrists with equipment to study children's eyes to see if they have any problems seeing clearly. The child doesn't have to say anything during the test.

In your internet search you discover that laser technology developed for NASA is now used with eye surgery. Lasers are also used to clean out coronary arteries so blood can flow better in and out of the heart. Another device for the heart was developed with NASA's help. A portable heart defibrillator is used to treat patients when their heart stops beating. This machine sends electrical pulses into the heart to get it to beat again. Heart pacemakers placed inside a person use technology similar to what NASA uses to operate satellites orbiting around the Earth.

NASA also helped develop the fetal heart monitor. The monitor allows mothers to have their unborn babies' hearts checked from remote locations. Doctors and nurses can instantly know if the babies' heartbeat is not normal.

You now see how cool it is that NASA technology helps us and gives us medical benefits on Earth. Your research even gives you the idea that you should become a doctor instead of becoming an astronaut. Then, you see a website that describes how some astronauts are also doctors. You smile because you believe you just found a perfect choice for a career.