Arspectra is driving major improvements in health care and surgery by developing Augmented Reality visualisation glasses. CEO Cédric Spaas talks about this medtech trend.
When Cédric Spaas brought his expertise in smart glasses to the medical environment in 2018, he had a key application in mind. Having received enthusiastic feedback from specialists, he knew these innovations would have an impact.
Two years later, when the covid-19 pandemic struck, the full scale of the impact on medical applications became dramatically clearer. Lockdowns and social distancing forced surgeons to rethink the way they worked together in clinical and educational settings. Telemedicine tools exploded as did the need for remote assistance. For Spaas, this confirmed his conviction of the vast applications for visualising medical data with smartglasses.
“Senior surgeons could support juniors at a distance while they operated. And a senior surgeon or professor that could not teach their students around an operating table, was able to stream it to the learning audience”, said Spaas.
Surgery navigation
Another application is surgery navigation. Spaas uses the analogy of a painting hanging on the wall: “If I ask you to copy it free hand, you will not draw the lines correctly.” But better results can be achieved by placing a light behind the painting and tracing the outline on the paper on top of the painting.
He says that the firm’s smart glasses work in a similar way. “We take data that’s normally projected on screens around the operating table into glasses that are fully transparent. You see your target patient, your wound, and you see the data within the field of view.”
“Senior surgeons could support juniors at a distance while they operated. And a senior surgeon or professor that could not teach their students around an operating table, was able to stream it to the learning audience”
Arspectra CEO Cédric Spaas
By visualising the procedure data in the direct sight of the surgeons, their work becomes less prone to error, eventually improving patient outcomes. The approach also saves time and money–critical to ensure affordable access to life-saving procedures.
Commercialisation in 2022
After four years spent working on R&D, Arspectra commercialised its first fully proprietary products in 2022, testing the market’s maturity. Spaas said: “It’s one thing to have a good idea, and a good team, and the investors. But you need to have a market that is ready to embrace that new technology.”
Telemedicine & remote assistance
The most-popular models so far have been those that were the easiest to adopt, in telemedicine and remote assistance, for instance. Adoption of surgery navigation tools is slowed by technological complexity and regulation. However, Spaas believes that disruptive solutions will reach the market in the next 5 years. He said: “It’s at the early stage of its rising curve. The application potential is huge.” Arspectra, which was a laureate of Fit 4 Start, currently has a team of over 25, and is targeting both the North American and European markets.
This article was first published in the Silicon Luxembourg magazine. Get your copy.
