Looking back: Companies making changes to the lives of everyday people

Looking back: Products that are changing the lives of everyday people

A special episode highlighting outstanding companies making significant improvements to our everyday lives. From enhancing experiences for the deafblind community to changing the way we rest for a refreshed and ready start to the day. We highlight the innovative and creative efforts making the world a better place, one product at a time.

Feeling inspired after listening to this? Listen back to all of our episodes on the PTC website or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Listen to the full Tatum Robotics episode here, and find out more about the company here.

Listen to the full Occuity episode here, and find out more about the company here.

Listen to the full Marks and Spencer episode here, and find out more about the company here.

Listen to the full Eight Sleep episode here, and find out more about the company here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

Third Angle is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Rema Mukena. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where we're highlighting companies making big differences to the lives of everyday people.

I'm your host, Paul Hames from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology.

Here at Third Angle, we featured some outstanding companies that are going above and beyond to improve lives. From working with the DeafBlind community to enhance their experiences in the world, to a company helping us rest in the most efficient way, fresh for the day ahead, feeling fully rested and ready to take on the world.

On this podcast, we love to highlight how amazing people are using innovation and creativity to make the world a better place, one product at a time. In this special episode, I want to take you on a journey to revisit some of those products and the people behind them. To kick off, we land in Boston at Tatum Robotics, the first collaborative cloud based robotic hand company that is creating an impact on the lives of the deafblind community and bridging the gap in a world that is not set up for everybody.

So right now we're looking at a bit of a deconstructed hand,  , but you can see it's a tendon driven system. We have 18 degrees of freedom, which again, it needs to have all of this dexterity in order to achieve the handshapes of American Sign Language. So part of the design process was we started with five degrees of freedom.

You know, you might just think of a traditional gripper, each finger can move in one way. And then we started adding in additional degrees of freedom as we weren't able to make different handshapes. And that way, really making sure the design is. as optimized as possible. We're not having any extra degrees of freedom.

We're not paying for additional motors. We're really making sure that this is optimized specifically for signing. Yes. So the way that DeafBlind people interact with it as it's signing. So as this demo right here, we're just sort of watching it, but DeafBlind folks actually hold from behind. So they hold right along the back with their, the tips of their fingers, almost hitting the thumb here.

And then as it signs, They're able to feel it bending, and they know what those different forms, what those forms sign. So if we click one of the application buttons,

So it just signed the word story because I was going into the story app. So then if I enter the application, it'll then start to ask me a tag, so what filters you're looking for. And it really, it's very intuitive and all of the apps work the exact same way. So the goal is if you understand how story works, the same walkthrough process for news.

So really just getting them comfortable with how to interact with the system. Usually when we go to these testing, we essentially, we set up, kind of sitting just like we are, sort of kitty cornered with the robot in the middle. And I try to describe, let them feel it. That's always the first step, so they run their hands down the front, feel the buttons, understand what's in front of them.

We were actually just in D. C. recently, and I tend to start by doing just sample sentences. The cat walks through the door. You know, simple sentences just so they, we can get an idea of, again, the signing speed they need, the grammar patterns they use, things like that. And for whatever reason,  , this woman I was working with, I randomly put in smelly cat.

And this woman started telling me about how she was born blind in one eye. And she got a surgery and recently lost vision in her other eye. So now she's completely deaf and completely blind. Learning tactile signing. And I did Smelly Cat and she basically started to cry there. She was sitting there talking about how her favorite show used to be Friends.

When growing up she could hear it and she could read the captions. And it was so exciting for her that she could get that moment back. So we started doing friends quotes and doing all those things together. And it's an experience we get frequently of these people that are just so deprived of entertainment of these technologies that people really see how much of an impact this could have on them going forward.

You know, the world is not set up for everybody right now and how can we bridge that gap? And there have been previous projects developing fingerspelling hands or robotics for the deaf Mainly in academia, and nothing's ever gone through commercialization. So a lot of the work that we do, that we do here, is really making sure that we bridge that gap.

   I think the biggest misunderstanding is that tactile sign is, people think that it's simple. People often think that ASL is just sort of manually coded English, and that cannot be further from the truth.    the fact that I've been working on ASL translation for two years, I think proves that. If it were simple, then it'd be over by now.

But, truly, and even assumptions about visual sign are not even, they don't carry over to tactile sign the same way. So, you really have to have personal experience with the people that use the language as a primary language to understand it at all.    a lot of people really think it's as simple as, if you know English, then you can, you know, You can just move your hands around, and you can get to the sign.

   or that all signs look like the concept that they represent in English. Like that the sign for tree looks like what an actual tree looks like. You know, raising your hand to mimic the trunk and stuff like that. And that's true, but some other signs don't work like that at all. So it's definitely, it's a complicated language, not just a code.

   and I think that's the, that's one of the biggest understandings we encounter with non signers is that they assume that it must be,  , simple. 

I think that one of the biggest hurdles we face as a constant is, you know, It's showing the importance of bringing communication to the DeafBlind. I think a lot of people see the DeafBlind community and they might think there are three to five of them.

But there are millions of these people that are completely isolated. And I think often we have to show that there's this need and also that we're solving the need correctly. Showing them that this way we build this technology will allow for easier pick up for this. They can use it easily. They don't need to have A hundred hours of training to learn a language they don't know.

And that has really been the hurdle that we've been facing. It's really just, again, that whole awareness of that this is an important issue and we're tackling it in a way that is not ableist. We're not pushing the hearing English majority into this community. We're really hoping to preserve the identity of the DeafBlind community and signing culture, but in a way that's just accessible for them.

That was Samantha Johnson. And Nicole Rich from Tatum Robotics. Now we're zooming into the world of acuity, who are creating solutions for some of humanity's greatest health care challenges, diabetes and Alzheimer's, using their contactless handheld devices that not only unlocks the full power of the eye, but also makes assessing the eye easier and safer, opening up endless health care possibilities.

For this episode, we went on a tour of their HQ in Reading in the UK. 

As you can see here on our engineering desks, these are prototypes of PM1 pachymeter, our first ever product. This is what's being clinical trialled today. So we measure the corneal central thickness. It's an L shaped device, very simple.

Pick it up out of the cradle and you can see you've got this handheld part, a piece at the front that points towards the patient. All I do is hold it up a few centimetres away from the patient. The patient looks down the and within a few seconds, I get a measurement. It looks like it's an object from the future.

It's super glossy,    really sleek. The first impressions you pick it up, this is a device that feels good to use.    you can see we've got this lovely bezel on the front as well. So it kind of references camera vernacular. We hope it will be a bit like owning a lovely DSLR, and people will really become fond of it.

You can see it sits in a charging cradle. It wirelessly charges overnight, so you never have to worry about whether it's powered. Leave it on your desk, pick it up when you need it. Let's come out of the office now and move over into the lab. You can see we've got loads of exciting machines out, so we've got microscopes, we've got compressors, biometers, soldering station.

We've got our prototype glucose meter over there. This is our project to measure blood glucose non invasively through the eye. You can see at the moment there's loads of wires hanging out. It's very much a research project, but we're really excited about the promise of this machine. Indigo is our concept for a handheld.

Portable, non invasive blood glucose monitor. One of the personal motivations that led me to acuity is the fact that my dad is diabetic. I have grown up seeing him finger prick and draw blood five times a day minimum. I've seen his insulin dependency progress. Through all of this, what I've seen is that the instruments that we have in, or that we used to have in our house were barbaric.

He used to draw so much blood that the ends of his fingers would become numb. And His sensitivity is vastly weakened. This isn't unique to him, by the way. If you ask any diabetic, they will all report the same thing. They hate having to draw blood through their fingers to measure their blood glucose multiple times a day.

If we can come up with the device that we think we can, which can measure blood glucose non invasively through the eye, a completely unique device, nothing like it exists in the world, that would be completely game changing for people like my dad. So over here is our wall of plastic. We've got eight prototypes.

There was so much learning over the last few years. Over here on the left, you can see this hairdryer looking thing. This was our first ever handheld Pachymeter. You can see it's got a big cord coming out of it. Very quickly, we moved on to turning this Pachymeter into a fully handheld, non contact, non tethered prototype.

So we have 3D printed enclosures, vacuum cast enclosures, and then over here on the right, you can see it's getting much sleeker, much more mature, because we started to injection mold our enclosure. And you can see here the slight difference between these injection molded components. Well, the difference was that this is when we started to introduce our own custom plastic.

Beforehand, we were really struggling to get the colour that we wanted, very beige orangey plastic, which is pretty typical of medical devices. You're restricted on the type of materials that you can use. It's very difficult to achieve what we're trying to do. Over here on the right, you can see the finished product is much nicer, much sleeker.

very bright white polycarbonate that we custom developed with a partner in Germany. Nothing like this exists on the market today. To have a handheld axial length meter which makes no contact with the eye and takes a reading super quickly is completely game changing.

That was Richard Kadri-Langford and design engineer Jamie Sargent. This time we're making a transition into the world of bra fittings and how one brand in particular is taking the lead. The one and only Marks Spencer have a huge heritage with womenswear, and particularly lingerie being a cornerstone of their business.

In this episode we're exploring their womenswear department in London and hear from the team who are working with customers to achieve the perfect bra fit. We walk around their incredible workshop spaces where they're working with a range of fabrics, ideas and developing the future of fashion. 

M&S is obviously, has a huge heritage, over 140 years since the, you know, since the Penny Bazaar was first conceived, and    you know, womenswear, and particularly lingerie within that, is a cornerstone of our business, and we've, we've always been well known for that.

For our, for our bras and knickers and it to this day remains, you know, our probably our biggest market share department we've led with women's wear because it is the, it's the business unit that does lead in terms of style perception. You know, we used to refer to the CEO of the household. You know, the woman is the center of the decision making and Certainly within M&S is influential in a lot of the menswear as well.

We're now on lingerie. A big part of our lingerie business is our bra business, and we do over a million bra fits a year. The skill that we have within our store colleagues in enabling customers to find the right size of bra, because there's a ridiculous proportion of the great British public who are walking around with the wrong size bra on.

I think it's about 70%. So really important that we try and it's amazing the feedback we get from customers when they have their lives transformed by sort of finally finding the right size of bra. So it's a really important part of our business and,    you know, what we're most famous for, you know, we understand,    that kind of modern mainstream and people are talking about us from a trend perspective, you know, we're being featured in the magazines.

You know, the press are really picking up on what we're doing. So it's,    you know, it's, it's really exciting journey at the moment. As part of that modern mainstream re evaluation, we, we created a campaign called anything but ordinary simply because we were deemed and perceived by our customers and. The market really as being a bit ordinary from a trend perspective.

So we really wanted to put this mantra out that, you know, we can surprise we can be anything but ordinary. And after a couple of years of redeveloping the brand, we took the decision to,    you know, to go out and work with a well known fashion icon. You know, we spoke to Sienna's team. And she was absolutely thrilled to come and join us on that journey.

And I think it's really important to say that we would never have felt confident to have done that two or three years ago, but we've, we got to a level where we thought, you know what, cause our product now feels like it's strong enough to be associated with somebody of Sienna's iconic status. We normally start our trend inspiration about 18 months prior to a season.

And our inspiration comes from a huge amount of catwalk information that the team is trying. Used to, to ultimately work out what, you know, obviously a lot of the catwalk trends are quite extreme and aren't very mainstream. So they'll look for themes, for trends, for colors, fabrics, you know, inspiration to try and work out what they think will be relevant for, for the Marks and Spencer rangers and ultimately the Marks and Spencer customers and trying to make sure that it's, as I say, inspired and fashionable, but still wearable and mainstream.

So it goes without saying that for me, Fabric is a massive and key part of our business, particularly our women's wear. So now we're entering into our fabric room, which is where we keep all of our base fabrics. 

So we're looking at the fabrics for summer 2025, starting off kind of brainstorming from the trends, what we're going to put into the range, what we're selecting before we do the designs.

And from that, we'll look at like testing the fabric and prices and minimum orders. It's a really fluid process, the way we work with fabric. So we're constantly checking and catwalks and,    getting, going out there, looking at inspiration, feeling new fabrics and making sure we've got the best, best in the business, basically.

We've been doing a bit of work,    going out and seeing what people are wearing out there, on their evenings, evenings out, nice,    restaurant trips, to see what people are wearing, wearing in the evenings, doing a bit of casual socialising, and,    yeah.

That was Richard Price and the team at the M&S womenswear department. Now we're drifting off peacefully into the world of dreams with Eight Sleep in San Francisco, where they're dismantling the nightmare of insufficient rest. Their latest product, the Pod 4, uses autopilot technology to independently adjust temperature on each side of the bed for personalized comfort.

It also features a clever alarm that wakes you up at the optimal time, ensuring a better start to your day. So let's fade away into the clouds. 

What I have set up here is actually our newest product. It's called the Pod 4. You are actually going to be one of the first people in the world to experience it.

   so, hopefully,  , you get to,  , check it out. So, what I have here is basically a very simple bed demo. And I've kind of set it up as if, you know, someone was going to go to bed. So I think it'd be a great idea for you to just try the thermoregulation piece and just to see, like, kind of experience it in terms of how it feels.

So yeah.    why don't you hop in and kind of experience both sides. 

It's definitely toasty. It's very soothing. I feel like I could definitely do this. I don't know if I can stay asleep, I probably have to hide, so I probably have to switch. Okay, let's try the cool side. This is so nice, I've never, I didn't even know that beds could do this.

Yeah,  , what you find here is something called the pod hub, and, and then something called the pod cover is, is what goes over the bed.  , connected to that is we have a little,  , cord here, and traveling through the cord is water, and that's what actually provides the water. temperature differentials. So, if you're cold,    this can help create warm water and it'll pass the warm water across.

And if you're really warm, then this can actually chill the water and it'll pass,    the water through the cover. We're one of the few companies in the world that can actually offer this. This is much cheaper than air conditioning. So if you have air conditioning that, you know, has to cool down the entire house and the rooms that you're not using, this This uses way less power and then it just cools down the environment.

That really matters when you sleep is around the bed. I guess one thing, I'm not sure if you kind of noticed is yeah, one side is really cool and one side is really warm. And this is actually a really important feature for us is to have completely independent temperature control because often you sleep with a partner.

And then you're always fighting on, you know, someone wants it really warm and it's too hot for the other person or someone wants it really cool and it's too cold for the other person. So having two independent zones for temperature has been a really big hit for us. The other thing that,  , we've been working really hard on is to get it to be as comfortable as possible because, you know, there are water carrying tubes underneath the bed and that's what kind of does the temperature control.

And, you know, since previous generations, we made it a lot thinner and it's a lot more comfortable. Like we want it to be something that can match the mattress that, that you have today. And we call that invisible comfort. So I think with pod four, we've really made strong strides in that area. So we have something new called the Pod4 Ultra and it's actually a base that helps you move the mattress quite similar to an adjustable base where you can see here it's lifting up your torso as well as lifting up your legs.

So this is what we call the relax state and hopefully you feel quite relaxed. I do, 

I like that my legs come up and it's not just that I'm sitting up. 

We are adding this feature of Disadjustability, just to help situations before sleep where you could be, I might just move it again into something called reading mode.

It lifts your torso up and it just, rather than stacking the pillows behind your neck, you're able to kind of just use the bed to sit up. There are a lot of people in the world that really struggle with sleep and it affects their, their well being, it, it, it really impacts their daytime. When you go from saying, Oh, I just.

I really hate sleeping, or I hate going to sleep, or I hate how I feel after I sleep to, you know, I feel so much more refreshed. I'm ready for today. Like that's the result where we're looking for. You could sleep for eight hours and still feel pretty groggy in the morning. And that's really to do with the type of sleep that you get.

And ultimately it's the REM and the deep sleep that we think are the most impactful. So in terms of. What we're trying to do at 8sleep, if thermal regulation allows you to get more REM sleep and deep sleep, that just means you should be feeling a lot more refreshed and a lot more energized in the mornings.

And if we can do that in less time, then we've made sleep more efficient.

That was Harry Hsiao from 8sleep.

Wanting to make a change or wanting to learn more after listening to this episode? Well, all of our episodes are available on ptc. com or wherever you get your podcasts. Companies that make product the world relies on, rely on PTC.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jackie Cook, sound design and editing by Rema McKenna and music by Rowan Bishop.