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Healthcare professionals are using immersive technologies for different purposes—from staff training to patient engagement. Virtual and augmented reality developers are also doing their part to contribute to patient care. Together with medical professionals, they have been exploring new ways to provide pediatric patients with fun and unforgettable experiences.
The blog then takes a closer look at immersive applications that make hospitals feel more comfortable and friendly for young patients.
Virtual and augmented reality have come a long way. These immersive technologies have become powerful enough to provide comfort and relief throughout painful and unpleasant procedures. For example, VR and AR innovations have aided young patients who undergo gastroenterology procedures, chemotherapy, and blood draws.
AppliedVR produces digital solutions for virtual reality therapeutics (VRx). They aim to improve the clinical outcomes of patients with serious medical conditions using immersive solutions. Around 200,000+ hospitals have implemented their VR solutions, including Boston Children’s Hospital and Cedars-Sinai.
Both children’s hospitals use VR headsets to help their young patients cope with the pain, anxiety, and stress of their treatments. For instance, they let kids play Bear Blast before procedures to calm their nerves.
AppliedVR offers a wide array of games, movies, animations, and guided meditations, making the program suitable not only for kids but for patients of all ages.
The hospital is the last place you want to be if you’re a child. Rooms are cramped, stressful, and no fun at all. Augmented and virtual reality are making the experience less overwhelming for the young ones.
Take Chilzone for example. Early-Adopter developed this unique platform to improve pediatric care. It makes the dreary walls of a hospital room come to life. Chilzone utilizes a wide array of digital technologies, from immersive technologies to 3D printing. It allows patients to tap into their creativity and natural curiosity. Moreover, it makes them feel comfortable and in control of their situation.
One of their first creations was a program called Secret Garden. It places young patients in virtual environments, allowing them to see the people and places they love.
Early-Adopter believes that immersive technology has the capacity to relieve anxiety and aid in rehabilitation. Furthermore, they believe it has the potential to decrease dependence on pain medication.
The company raised $65,000 in an event last November, which enables them to expand their program. They will provide Montefiore’s Bronx facility with 40 VR headsets before the year ends, making them the largest VR and AR program in New York.
Children in the autism spectrum require special attention. They are easily overwhelmed by visual distractions and noises during therapy sessions. As a result, care providers often struggle to teach kids with special needs important social and communication skills.
Floreo, a virtual reality platform, addresses this challenge. It helps kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder learn a wide range of social skills through fun and engaging activities. Adults with ASD may also benefit from this application. Instead of delivering therapy in the usual constrained environment, Floreo places kids with special needs in virtual environments. Parents and therapists can supervise the immersive experience, guiding young learners as they progress.
Using Floreo, patients can play games and engage in activities where they can explore social connections. They can learn calming techniques as well.
Floreo only implements science-backed lessons into their platform. Schools, therapy practices, and numerous households across the country are already using Floreo.
Meanwhile, kids equipped with Google Glass can explore Brain Power’s suite of AR-based apps to practice social-emotional skills that will strengthen their self-reliance.
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While 34 % of machine and plant manufacturers have already discovered AR and VR for themselves, only 15 % use the technologies across all sectors. This is the result of a representative survey conducted by Bitkom Research on behalf of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
VR and AR support employees in various business areas such as process, energy, supply, production and electrical engineering. Typical applications are visual support in education and training, maintenance, assembly, animation, simulation and prototyping. “Data goggles can show production employees exactly where to place welding points or guide service technicians through the individual maintenance steps,” says Santu Mandal, Head-Manufacturing Business Unit at TCS in Germany. “Employees are thus supported and errors are reduced.”
The frequent use of VR and AR is reflected in the jobs created and planned: Almost a third (32 %) of the machine and plant manufacturers have already hired the appropriate specialists. In the future, VR or AR designers will be found in more than half of the companies (51 %). This is significantly more than in other sectors: On average for the economy as a whole, future demand will be around 26 %.
Digital pioneers
“Mechanical and plant engineering companies rely particularly frequently on innovations and already utilise many potentials much more consistently than other industries,” says Santu Mandal. “In the past, companies were technological pioneers and the signs are good that they will remain so in the digital world.”
Machine and plant manufacturers are also pioneers in other technologies: 38 % use 3D printing (total: 19 %) and 23 % robotics (total: 14 %). In general, 77 % of companies are open-minded about digitisation, 15 % of which are even very open-minded. As in other industries, about half of the companies have a person who coordinates digitisation across departments.
With this acquisition, six of the founding members of the WakingApp team will remain with the company and bring additional resources and expertise for developing the next generation of Scope AR’s augmented reality knowledge platform, WorkLink.
“We’re extremely pleased with the growth we’ve seen to date of enterprises adopting AR,” said Scope AR CEO and cofounder Scott Montgomerie in a statement. “With that growth comes more knowledge of what our customers need to successfully build AR into their business. The WakingApp team brings a great mix of AR development experience and creative thinking to Scope AR, as we continue to evolve our WorkLink platform to meet our customers’ current and future needs.”
WakingApp has a proprietary AR platform with technologies to help enterprises across industries create AR experiences. The acquisition expands Scope AR’s resources to more rapidly deliver new functionality to its WorkLink solution.
WorkLink is an AR knowledge platform that provides real-time remote assistance and access to prebuilt AR work instructions simultaneously — in one application — to allow workers to easily access the knowledge they need.
“We are thrilled to join the Scope AR team and become an integral part in the delivery of first-class AR solutions to enterprise organizations,” said WakingApp CEO Matan Libis in a statement.
Scope AR has 51 employees based in San Francisco and Edmonton, Canada. It has raised $15.8 million to date.
Company background: Taqtile develops augmented reality tech for industrial applications on headsets and mobile devices. Customers across six continents use its cross-platform Manifest software for training and other on-the-job purposes. The idea is to increase efficiency by reducing the time it takes to get work done while lowering error rates.
Customers: Clients include Seattle-area King County IT, which uses Manifest and Microsoft HoloLens to train operators at a wastewater treatment plant, and the New Zealand Defense Force. Taqtile initially launched in 2011 and focused on mobile app development before shifting gears to mixed reality.
Magic Leap deal: Joining the enterprise partner program is a key milestone for Taqtile, given that Magic Leap is a leader in the augmented reality industry, having raised nearly $3 billion. Magic Leap will now re-sell Taqtile’s Manifest solution as it turns its focus to enterprise use cases. Taqtile previously won a “Creator’s Grant” from Magic Leap to port its solutions to the company’s platform.
Taqtile is also a Microsoft partner and won the U.S. Partner for Mixed Reality and Intelligent Cloud award earlier this year at Microsoft Inspire. AT&T — which is a Magic Leap investor — is also a Taqtile partner.
Please note The AREA is not affiliated with market reports of this nature, but occasionally shares the information for the benefit and interest of others in the ecosystem.
This 152-page study is intended to enhance your strategic decision making, update you with crucial market developments and, ultimately, help to maximise your company’s profitability and potential.
This Report Addresses the Pertinent Issues, Such As:
• How is the Military Augmented Reality market evolving?
• How will each Military Augmented Reality submarket segment grow over the forecast period, and how much sales revenue will these submarkets account for in 2029?
• What is driving and restraining the Military Augmented Reality market?
• How will shares of the national markets change by 2029 and which country will lead the market in the same year?
• Who are the leading players, and what agreements and contracts have they entered into?
The mobile app (developed by Stockholm-based Objective Solutions) brings new efficiency and cost savings to workflows using mobile scanning of boarding passes, passports, meal vouchers and baggage tags. SAS has deployed the Scandit-powered app to their three Scandinavian airport hubs: Stockholm Arlanda, Oslo Gardermoen, and Copenhagen Kastrup. A detailed case study about the integration is now available.
SAS carries more than 30 million passengers annually to 120 destinations on over 170 aircraft and is widely recognized as a pioneer in digital innovation for the air travel industry. The Ground Handling App is part of a global, digital infrastructure initiative to streamline and improve key operations and improve the travelling experience for their growing volume of passengers. In the first deployment, SAS employees were equipped with 700 Galaxy A8 devices, with further rollouts planned across SAS’ global operations.
The Scandit software was easily integrated into the SAS IT ecosystem. Customer-facing SAS employees use the mobile app from anywhere in the airport, for example at the boarding gate where agents are no longer tied to gate podiums. Passengers are benefiting from a faster, more personalized service and SAS has reduced costs compared to the dedicated scanners and infrastructure. Booking changes can also be done seamlessly with the mobile app and baggage handlers use it to record and track baggage.
“We chose Scandit for its quality and flexibility,” said Fredrik Buxfeldt, Head of Digital Operations IT at SAS. “In addition to barcode scanning and OCR (optical character recognition) in mobile apps, Scandit also enables barcode scanning in websites, so our employees can also use mobile scanning from a browser if they don’t have the mobile app loaded.”
“SAS has reaped the benefits of modernizing data capture workflows with enterprise-grade mobile scanning,” said Samuel Mueller, CEO of Scandit. “We are delighted to play a part in this mobile evolution to help SAS meet its goals for outstanding customer service and operational efficiency.”
Resources
A short extract from the detailed interview is given below:
As part of his role in risk management, Bellows has consulted with large multinational customers to help them find solutions to their risk management issues. Often, they were most interested in workers’ comp risk because it tends to drive loss frequency and severity, impacts the workforce and absenteeism, and reduces efficiency and profitability.
Workers tend to be 30-50% of a company’s operating expense, so if you can reduce injuries you can increase efficiency, profitability, etc. Today with the shortage of workers that we see, a lot of companies are working at a 20% absenteeism rate.
Imagine what happens when you can’t find enough people to man the tasks in a factory. If you also have extensive injuries that put people out of work or on restrictive duty, it’s even more difficult to run the business. Making sure people can work safely and come back to the job every day is very important to risk managers. I also help risk managers with issues like fleet, liability, supply chain, business continuity, and disaster recovery—anything that keeps them up at night.
The app enables Nreal Light users to annotate objects within their field of view and stream what they see to remote experts, who can also add virtual notes or diagrams to the scene and share data with the user in real-time.
The solution is meant to leverage 5G connectivity via Deutsche Telekom to connect remote experts with field service technicians and the Snapdragon 835 platform for smartphone-tethered AR wearables to run the AR experience.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with best-in-class partners to bring the AR FieldAdvisor from an idea to an immersive XR experience that leverages cutting edge spatial computing,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, senior vice president strategy and technology innovation at Deutsche Telekom. “Going forward, we will focus on end-to-end 5G and edge computing integration with MobiledgeX to scale the solution for the enterprise market.
In the lifecycle of a product, once the design reviews have been carried out, and a final design has been decided upon, it makes sense to produce a prototype model of that product to check for any issues that may have been missed in design, and to test the materials and manufacturing process before committing to a full scale manufacturing run.
But it can also be time consuming and expensive to use up resources to produce just one item. And if the physical prototype requires more than one iteration, it can become a costly and inefficient process.
So how can the process of producing a prototype become more efficient?
Rapid Prototyping
Rapid prototyping is a group of techniques used to quickly fabricate a scale model of a physical part or assembly using 3D CAD data. Construction of the part or assembly is usually done using 3D printing or “additive layer manufacturing” technology.
Rapid prototyping’s mission was to reduce the lead time and cost of developing prototypes of new parts and devices, which was earlier only done with subtractive tool room methods such as CNC milling, turning, and precision grinding.
The use of 3D printing could have a large impact on the environment. As opposed to traditional manufacturing, for instance, in which pieces are cut from larger blocks of material, 3D printing creates products layer-by-layer and prints only relevant parts, wasting much less material and, therefore, wasting less energy in producing the raw materials needed. This also makes 3D printing more cost effective as you only pay for the materials you use.
These are all present a compelling case for using rapid prototyping, and the 3D printing industry has seen massive growth in recent years. But is there an even quicker, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly method of prototyping?
MR
The adoption of MR (Mixed Reality) technologies within the engineering and manufacturing industries has been growing steadily for the past few years. MR is enabling engineers to interact with their CAD, PLM and Visualization data like never before.
MR has already identified itself to be an alternative tool for carrying out many use cases; at Theorem Solutions we have “Experiences” for Maintenance, Training and Design Review that all make use of this new technology.
In the context of creating prototypes, Mixed Reality (MR) could even take over from 3D printing in the rapid prototyping race.
Mixed Reality (MR), using a device like the Microsoft HoloLens, places a holographic projection of digital data into, and in some cases responsive to, the physical world.
The traditional rapid prototyping process starts with the creation of geometric data, as a 3D solid using a CAD workstation, and it does for MR as well. Once a CAD model has been streamed to a MR device, it can be interrogated and inspected as you would a physical 3D object, and at full scale, so it’s as if it were physically in the room with you. 3D printing may be quick, but getting your CAD model into an MR device takes just a few minutes.
Going back to the earlier point about 3D printing being more environmentally friendly than traditional manufacturing methods; what is more environmentally friendly than not having to create a physical model at all?!
Doing your design reviews and prototyping digitally by using MR, means that you get all of the detail from your 3D CAD model, at full scale, in the real world environment that you want it in; factory floor, boardroom etc. without any of the waste materials, or additional energy required to power machinery. This also makes it more cost effective as you are not paying for those materials or the costs of using machinery and the people resource associated with it.
So whilst 3D printing definitely provides a more efficient way to create prototypes than traditional modelling methods, and people might prefer to have a physical model that they can actually hold in their hands, using innovative XR technologies to do all of your prototyping digitally might just be worth considering.