By Nancy Dahlberg
While so far much of the recent Magic Leap news has been about entertainment and gaming, Magic Leap’s CEO Rony Abovitz has always said that Magic Leap’s core mission is to improve lives. Abovitz co-founded Mako Surgical before founding Magic Leap.
To that end, the company has announced a series of moves in healthcare.
To lead the efforts, the company hired health-tech executive Jennifer Esposito, formerly of Intel, who joins Magic Leap as the Vice President of Health. In addition, Magic Leap is partnering with at least five companies and nonprofits, including the South Florida-based Dan Marino Foundation, to bring its Magic Leap One into healthcare and clinical settings as well as operating rooms. Magic Leap also has an ongoing partnership with the University of Miami, Abovitz’s alma mater, which could include healthcare innovation in the future.
Spatial computing a healthcare disrupter
“Spatial computing removes the barriers of geography and enables care providers access to an unprecedented amount of contextual information that surrounds patients and clinical spaces. All of this, coupled with AI, 5G and IOT technologies, enable spatial computing to transform the experiences of both patients and care providers in ways that previous technologies have not. It allows for the development of novel, more adaptive and personalized forms of digital therapeutics, and creates completely new ‘points of care.’ Ultimately spatial computing enables a significant shift from reactive care to a more continuous health and wellness system throughout lifespans,” Magic Leap said in a blog post.
In one partnership, Magic Leap and German medical technology company Brainlab aim to transform how surgeons and other clinicians visualize and access medical imaging data, including through a collaborative 3D Spatial viewer that can be used for surgical planning. Magic Leap said the two companies are also working on tools that will merge Magic Leap spatial computing platform with Brainlab’s data management, cloud computing, visualization and data pre-processing capabilities.
Magic Leap is also partnering with SyncThink of Palo Alto, known for its eye health solutions and tracking analytics. SyncThink hopes to make the Magic Leap Oneit “the gold standard in brain health assessment” by letting doctors use the platform’s collection of sensors to easily determine what wearers are seeing and experiencing, VentureBeat reported today.
Magic Leap is also working with Boston-based XRHealth to bring spatial computing solutions to medical practitioners. With the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, it is creating a new medical training application for Magic Leap One.
Magic Leap’s partnership with Dan Marino Foundation
And as we reported before on this blog, Magic Leap has been working with South Florida’s own Dan Marino Foundation, which supports students and young adults on the Autism Spectrum gain s independence and employment. Young adults on the spectrum are often able to excel at many jobs, including technical ones, but the in-person job interview process is extremely difficult. The Virtual Interactive Training Agent, or VITA, is a virtual simulation job interview practice system that was developed by DMF and USC. Through its partnership with Magic Leap, it can be accessed with the Magic Leap One headset and they have big plans.
“The current solution uses avatars, but we envision a future where human-centered AI is applied – a virtual human who can be a guide and trainer for a variety of use cases, including the one at the Dan Marino Foundation. Future versions can address more use cases and leverage artificial intelligence to measure eye gaze, speech patterns and response time, generate real-time feedback and deliver adaptive adjustments to the learning plan,” Magic Leap said in its post.
You can read more about Magic Leap’s work with DMF here.
Follow @ndahlberg on Twitter and email her at [email protected]
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