Transcript 0:00 [gentle music] People had worse than twenty four hundred eyesight and couldn't read even the first line on the LogMAR chart, which is the one that has the E, C, D up at the top. 0:13 Were able to read three, four, and some people read five lines down, and these are all people, to qualify for the trials, they couldn't have... They had to have stopped reading at least a year ago. 0:23 Some of these people hadn't read in, like, four years. And so, uh, it was, it was, you know, thrilling to see people put the headset on, recognize the faces of their loved ones, be able to pick back up reading. 0:37 [upbeat music] Welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. Hello, listeners, and welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show. I'm your host, Peggy Smedley. 0:53 My next guest is award-winning innovator with more than one hundred and fifty patents filed, with some sixty patents issued in the sectors of multi-channel streaming, mobile video, augmented reality eyewear, RFID location-based tracking, nano chemicals, and ultra-high efficiency musk capacitor transformer-less powerless supplies. 1:19 He also won the twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards for best products to power the IoT while CEO of Semitrix, a company he founded based on his Switch Cap Transformer-less Power Supplies invention. 1:37 Please join me in welcoming Michael Freeman, founder and CEO of Ocutrix Vision Technologies. Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you, Peggy. Thank you for having me on. 1:49 It's a pleasure to be here today and talk with all your guests. I have to tell you, Michael, listening and just going through your bio, I was, like, overwhelmed. 1:58 Anybody who's [laughs] got that many patents filed, that many patents issued, has, has... is just fascinating. I mean, I... Tell me a little bit more about your background. I mean, because it's really impressive. 2:10 I kind of cheated. [laughs] So I'm, I'm actually a lawyer by, by, uh, training and by, uh, education, but my father bought a computer company when we were kids. It's called PC Designs. 2:20 We grew up building computers, and, uh, that's where I learned all my engineering. 2:24 We were o-one of the largest suppliers of computer products in the nineties to, uh, the state of California and, uh, s-several other states. 2:33 And so through that, I learned a lot about systems and programming and hardware and software, and as a result of that, at one point in time in nineteen ninety-four, we actually invented the first product and protocol for streaming, uh, mobile video. 2:51 So think, uh, FaceTime or any time that you send a video, uh, over your, uh, cell phone to someone, and that is we were, uh, making a one G cell tower in nineteen ninety-four, like a six G cell tower by having six transceivers dividing up the video, sending it. 3:08 And so television stations loved it because they could get on the air. 3:11 They could send a reporter out with a box with a camera on it and, and start filming, and it was back at the station by the time the, the, uh, uh, reporter was, you know, ready to ask questions of the, of the guest interviewee. 3:25 And so through that, we actually won two Emmy Awards, one for the Best Spot News and one for the Best Technological Innovation for Television Arts and Sciences for nineteen ninety-four. 3:35 And so it's kind of continued from there. And, uh, that's, that's a little bit about my background. 3:40 But that's amazing to think about what you're doing today with your ORBot and how that's gonna change the lives of surgeons. 3:48 How did you go from there to thinking about coming up with something that's in the medical field and what you're gonna do for surgeons? Well, it's an interesting story. 3:56 My, uh, father, who owned a number of companies and was a fighter pilot in the Air Force, ended up being a brigadier general, used to fly, you know, twice the speed of sound in the fighter jets, ended up, uh, developing macular degeneration later in life. 4:10 And first time in my life I'd ever seen him where he was, you know, depressed, where he was disengaged. He couldn't read emails anymore. He couldn't see people's faces. We come from a large family. 4:21 He had, like, twenty grandkids. He couldn't recognize who they were. 4:25 And so in two thousand thirteen, he sat us down during the Christmas time and said, "Look, I know I can't, uh, you know, heal this disease, but let's see if we can't find a way around it." 4:35 And so we all got together and started figuring out, okay, how could... knowing as much as we know about video and about pixels and about streaming, how can we, uh, get around this? 4:45 And the breakthrough came when that Christmas, Sony and Samsung and everyone had curved televisions. And so we bought him a curved television. 4:53 When he walked up close to the curved television, he said, "Wow, I can see so much better. I still can't see the fifty-yard line, but I can see the, I can see the sides." 5:03 And we realized, oh, he's still got good peripheral vision, so what we need to do is create a technology where we can take all the pixels in the streaming video and move them from the center, where macular degeneration is a central eye disease, where you can't see centrally, and move it from the center over onto the periphery. 5:23 We did that. It worked. 5:25 He was able to, uh, read emails and see faces and, uh, be active again, uh, uh, with his family and in the community, and it was such a thrill to him that he said, "We've got to commercialize this because this is such a devastating, uh, illness." 5:40 And actually, the statistics show that there are, there are many people that just, uh, disengage, commit suicide, you know, uh, try to end their life because when you lose your eyesight, that is so, you know, debilitating. 5:54 So we created these glasses that, uh, move all the pixels out. Is this the OcuLens eyewear that you're talking about? Is that next part of this? Or where, where does this all come together? Yeah. 6:05 So that's the OcuLens AMD, which is for advanced macular degeneration and low vision. People put on the headset. 6:12 They go through a visual field test so that the digital headset can know where the analog defect is, so they seePer each eye, they see shooting stars, flashes of light. Where they see it, they talk to the headset. 6:24 Where they don't see it, that's where we know, okay, they can't see, so we put a dot there. We have about five hundred thousand polynomials. 6:31 We connect those dots with a shape, and then right now we're doing f- sixty frames a second video. There's two 4K cameras on the front of the headset. 6:39 It takes real world, uh, and then within five milliseconds of each of those sixty frames per second, we buffer the image and move all the pixels out so that all the pixels in the in- in the original video are there, just none of them are displayed on the eye. 6:55 And for reading, we move the pixels just left and right. So as you're scanning down a row of words, the, the, the letters will jump out of the way of the, of where the defect is. 7:06 And the result is we've had our initial clinical trials that have been presented in about eleven countries, about fifteen professional associations, uh, uh, seminars presented. 7:17 And, and, uh, people had worse than twenty-four hundred eyesight and couldn't read even the first line on the LogMAR chart, which is the one that has the E, C, D up at the top, um, were able to read three, four, and some people read five lines down. 7:33 And these are all people, to qualify for the trials, they couldn't have-- they had to have stopped reading at least a year ago. Some of these people hadn't read in like four years. 7:42 And so, uh, it was, it was, you know, thrilling to see people put the headset on, recognize the faces of their loved ones, be able to pick back up reading. And so that's our first, uh, product. 7:54 Uh, but we're working with surgeons, and so we start thinking about other things. So in that idea, so what makes these, uh, and my mind's racing right now, compared to like other AR glasses? 8:05 'Cause, you know, I know that there's a lot out. And now are the... Well, let me step back a second. They're not available now. Will they be available? What, what's the timeframe? 8:14 Yeah, so we, like a lot of companies, have, have, um, uh, had-- we had about a seventy percent, uh, China supply chain, so we're about a hundred and twenty days delayed in getting the glasses out. 8:24 It was gonna be the end of this year. Now it's gonna be first quarter next year. 8:28 And we're actually, uh, we're actually moving, uh, to onshore, uh, with some of our production capabilities so that we don't have to be so dependent on the China supply chain. 8:37 So the OR, uh, uh, the, uh, OcuLens AMD and the OcuLens, uh, RMP, which is the remote medical presence, which is where doctors and patients can see each other and the headset can run through tests and stuff, those will both be out in the first and second quarter of twenty twenty-one. 8:57 And those that you're gonna be working with surgeons, will those now be able to be different than compared to what everybody's thinking about other AR glasses, and these are your-- the idea is to work with surgeons versus what people are envisioning what are typical AR glasses and what might be out there? 9:12 Or is this something now, look, well, you're gonna be able to see these and say, "Look, th- we've got a type of glass that's gonna help with vision that's gonna work with surgeon," and then you're gonna be able to do these things that are gonna be other types of glasses that are g- expand what you're gonna do in the marketplace? 9:28 Yes, exactly. And so we went for enterprise. 9:30 You know, a lot of the major players that I could name, uh, most of your listeners will know, uh, basically came out with a set of glasses at a price point, had no idea what they were gonna do with them, tried to sell them to consumers, and it didn't work. 9:44 Well, we came in the other direction, and we had a very specific need where people had a very, you know, uh, uh, high motivation, uh, to buy our glasses and to use our glasses, and that was on the low vision and, and the, uh, macular degeneration side. 10:01 And then as we were working with the surgeons, of course, the, the surgeons refer the patients, and, and that's how we get the, uh, surgeons. We have a large medical advisory board. 10:11 We realized that the surgeons needed help too, and the visualization in surgery is one thing that we could do to improve surgeries, to make them, uh, easier for the surgeon, easier for the patient, for faster patient recovery times. 10:24 And really the basis of all this is when we first started out, we thought, "Well, we'll do the software, and we'll use someone else's, uh, hardware." But when we looked, no one else was even close to what we needed. 10:36 So we have the largest, uh, field of vision. We've got a sixty degrees field of vision horizontally and thirty-six degrees, uh, vertically, and that is an exact sixteen by nine, just like your television screen. 10:49 So it's a very easy, easy viewing. So each eye has basically a large television screen in it. The other of the competitors don't have anywhere close to that- So- -wide field of vision. 11:01 So Michael, this is really, and I know we've only got about a minute left, this is really the future of telemedicine, the way I hear you describe it, in changing people's visions and, and what doctors are gonna be able to do. 11:12 Exactly. Because, uh, before, uh, Peggy, they've used what they call a SOM, a standard op-optical microscope that's not digital. 11:21 So all you do is you're just looking through some lenses like, you know, a binocular to, to... or like a microscope, and they don't get any of the advantages of the modern day, you know, um, uh, 3D imaging. 11:33 So we can, with our headset, a surgeon, a heart surgeon can take a three, a pre, uh, like a, a 3D image that they've done through an MRI, and they have identified in that MRI where the defective vein is or something. 11:47 He can see that 3D image and, and actually hold it in his hands virtually out in front of the headset. 11:54 He can turn it and get the orientation, uh, just right and l- overlay it on the real heart and know exactly which vein it is to, to inject or to, uh, make an incision or to do an ablation, where they freeze and reset the heart from back into sinus rhythm. 12:10 And so, uh, and it allows people to see remotely what the surgeon is seeing. 12:16 Uh, and if someone remotely says, "No, you need to scrape right here," then there's gonna be a cursor that comes up on the person that's doing the surgery and show them exactly where we're going. 12:25 Uh, we're working with Dr. Daniel Ting, uh, from Singapore and, uh, Moorfields in, in London to basically add AI into the, in-into it. 12:36 So we record all of the, uh, surgeries, and then just like with, uh, people who get LASIK surgery, the, the LASIK surgery you get now after millions of LASIK surgeries are a lot better than the first ones because AI engine and, uh, help improve that. 12:51 We're gonna do that for all types of surgeries, for abdomic surgery, for cardiac surgery, for vascular surgery, for spinal surgery. 13:00 And so we'll have a little cursor that says, "This is the optimum place to cut," and you know, that kind of thing. 13:05 So it's really the future of, of surgery, and there's a big push from hospitals and doctors to change from the old just optical microscope that has no digital components in it whatsoever into the digital world. 13:17 Just like the television stations used to use linear tape, and now it's all digital, this is a big changeover in the next ten years for hospitals, doctors, and clinics. I tell you, Michael, we're really excited for you. 13:28 Michael Freeman, founder and CEO of OcuTrix Vision Technologies. Where, where-- What's your URL so our listeners can follow up and learn more about you and get physicians to follow up with this? Yes. Thanks. 13:39 It's www.oculenz, O-C-U-L-E-N-Z,.com. Thank you so much. I hope you'll come back as you guys get these to market. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you, Peggy. All right, listeners. Pleasure being here. We're out of time. 13:53 Remember, we are broadcast live every Tuesday at twelve PM Central. Check out our website at connectedworld.com or thepeggySmedleyShow at thepeggysmedleyshow.com. And as always, you can tweet at us at ConnectedWMag. 14:04 Okay. This is The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. Have a great week. [upbeat music]
