Chicago technology will soon be going up in a future SpaceX mission.
Chicago-based medical video game studio Level Ex told Chicago Inno that some of its tech will be used aboard Polaris Dawn, the first of the Polaris Program’s three human spaceflight missions.
Level Ex creates interactive gaming solutions and recently won big at the Chicago Innovation Awards for its dermatology game. The startup built the first cloud gaming platform in health care with games in gastroenterology, cardiology, pulmonology and dermatology, and continues to expand into new specialties.
Level Ex founder and CEO Sam Glassenberg said Level Ex has been described as being the "deep-dish hot dog" of Chicago high tech because it combines the city’s pedigree in video game development with the city’s health care ecosystem. He said the Covid pandemic also helped fuel Level Ex’s growth as more surgeons began training remotely as a result of a rise in telemedicine.
On the Level Ex platform, users can do surgery in a virtual setting simulated in the cloud.
Glassenberg said that in collaboration with SpaceX, Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) and KBR, Level Ex has developed training and in-flight procedural guidance through its gaming platform that can be used to train astronauts in space to do ultrasounds in zero gravity.
“The content we’re building for them is actually going to be running on a device that they’re using on the spacecraft,” he told Chicago Inno. “Imagine you're nine months into the mission, and one of the astronauts grabs his chest in microgravity and rolls over unconscious. There's no X-ray, there's no CT scan, there's no MRI. All you have is ultrasound. That's the only way you can see inside the body.”
He said that Level Ex created a trainer for the procedure that astronauts can take up and run on an iPhone on the spacecraft.
"The whole idea here is to test things that can be used on future space missions," he said. "There's a version of this that we've set up where it can literally run in zero gravity mode. You can take your phone and place it in front of you ... because in microgravity you can just place a phone in space and it'll stay there."
The training would start specifically for ultrasounds on the neck, but Glassenberg hopes to expand to a wide range of diagnostic procedures.
The Polaris Dawn mission expects to launch no earlier than March 2023.
