Occuity: The future of health lies behind our eyes

“We’re using the eye as a window to the health of the body. We’re developing solutions to some of humanity’s greatest healthcare challenges.”

Our eyes contain a vast amount of information about our health, but they’re an untapped resource. Assessing the eye requires contact, and that can be uncomfortable and unsafe, so it’s often avoided. That’s why Occuity’s technology is game-changing.

Their contactless handheld devices not only unlock the full power of the eye and open up a world of healthcare opportunities, but they’re also so easy to use that patients can assess themselves. In this episode we meet Occuity’s head of marketing Richard Kadri-Langford, and design engineer Jamie Serjeant. They take us on a tour of Occuity’s HQ in Reading in the UK, to learn about two of their devices, the PM1 Pachymeter and their non-invasive glucose metre Indigo. We even get a peak behind the scenes in the ‘Midnight Room’, their secret development lab.

We also hear from Jon Hirschtick who explains how Occuity uses PTC’s CAD solution Onshape to create the intricate and visually striking designs they pride themselves on.

Find out more about Occuity here.

Find out more about Onshape here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

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

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou. Location recording by Neil Kanwal. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where the future of health lies behind our eyes.

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

More than a window to the soul, the eye can tell us an unbelievable amount about the health of our bodies too. But modern medicine has yet to unlock the full power of the eye. Current methods to assess them are invasive and uncomfortable, so we often rely on other ways to monitor and screen for chronic health conditions. But for Occuity, that’s not enough – the opportunity of the eye is too great to miss out on. After spending many hours in his garage, co-founder of Occuity and serial inventor Robin Taylor formed the beginnings of a solution to this problem. Now, he and the team have landed on something game-changing: hand-held devices that don’t need to touch the body at all that make assessing the eye easier and safer, opening up endless healthcare possibilities. 

At Occuity, we’re passionate about putting medicine into the hands of people. We create handheld devices that are super easy to use. And by doing that, we hope that we can get medical devices out of the way – we can just focus on people’s health. Today is a really good day for you to come. We’re doing our clinical trial for the PM1 Pachymeter. What we have is scores of volunteers coming through, they’re having their eyes measured using a bunch of different techniques. So we’ve got a big desktop (??2:16). We’ve also got ultrasound pachymeters, they make contact with the eye. And then we also have our device which is non-contacting, handheld, and completely pain-free. What we’re hoping to achieve with this clinical trial is proving that our device is as accurate and precise as the competition. What this will do is give people confidence that we’re able to take exactly the same measurement with the same quality, but without all of the downsides of the existing competitors.

At Occuity, we’re using the eye as a window to the health of the body. So we’re developing solutions to some of humanity’s greatest healthcare challenges; things such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and even things such as myopia.

As you can see here on our engineering desks, these are prototypes of the PM1 Pachymeter, our first-ever product – this is what’s been in clinical trial 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 and a big piece at the front that points toward the patient. All I do is hold it up a few centimetres away from the patient, the patient looks down the barrel, and within a few seconds, I get a measurement. It looks like it’s an object from the future. It’s super glossy and sleek. The first impression is 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 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, and pick it up when you need it.

One in two people are living with glaucoma unknowingly, so they don’t know they’ve got it. Glaucoma is a common eye condition that involves a build-up of fluid in the front of the eye and it puts pressure on the optic nerve and can lead to long-term site damage. So it’s very important that we can identify these people. The PM1 Pachymeter is a device that measures the corneal thickness of the eye. And it’s an important measurement when you’re trying to diagnose glaucoma.

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, compressors, biometers, (??4:35) station. We’ve got a 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 are loads of wires hanging out. It’s very much a research project but we’re excited about the promise of this machine. Indigo is our concept for a handheld, portable, non-invasive blood glucose monitor. What it does is give people independence. They don’t have to draw blood anymore. They can take these devices with them wherever they go, whether they’re sitting in a restaurant, whether they’re on the train, or anywhere that they need to take a blood glucose measurement. They simply hold it up to their eye, and it shines a low-powered beam of light, and from the signal that we get back, we can infer what that blood glucose level is. One of the personal motivations that led me to Occuity is the fact that my dad is diabetic. I have grown up seeing him fingerprick and draw blood five times a day minimum, and I’ve seen his insulin dependency progress. Through all of this, what I’ve seen is that the instruments that we have, 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 unique device, and nothing like it exists in the world – that will be completely game-changing for people. 

We’re not the first company that wants to try and make a non-invasive blood glucose monitor. This is the holy grail. Everyone wants to be able to ship a product that can do this. But no one has succeeded. Why haven’t people succeeded? Well, one of the big reasons is that everyone’s trying to look through the skin. The problem is, skin is a very diffuse and difficult medium to see through. What we’re doing with Indigo, which is unique, is we’re looking through the eye itself. By looking through the eye, which is optically clear, we can detect very, very tiny changes in the properties of the eye. And using that, we can work out what someone’s blood glucose is.

So yeah, this is a more exciting end of the office. This used to be, when we first moved in, a lovely big, open-plan kitchen space. But now the engineers have got their hands on this as well. And they’ve transformed it into a working engineering lab. So we’ve got Michael over here, he’s working on one of our next projects, which is called the AX1, which is an axiometer, so that’ll measure the actual length of the eye, which is the length of the eyeball from the front to the back. And that’s the product we’re aiming for in the myopia management market. And it’s one that we’re excited about. And it’s got so much potential because myopia is such a huge problem. By 2050, they think that 50% of the world’s population will suffer from myopia – myopia being short-sightedness. Being short-sighted isn’t necessarily a problem in its own right. What is a problem is the growth of the eyeball. So the eyeball in children grows naturally. But in lots of children, it doesn’t stop growing, effectively, as it should. And therefore they end up with a long eyeball and a long axial length. And this device will measure that axial length to help give treatments that can slow down the progression of myopia. And if we go over and have a look at it in a bit more detail, you’ll see this is an early working prototype that we’re working on now to take to an upcoming trade show. We were told just a few months ago that a hand-held axial length device wasn’t something that we would be able to do. And we were told that by external third-party people. Our CTO effectively locked himself in his garage and produced the early prototypes for the AX1 device you see in front of you now within just a few months. And that’s because of the nature of our technology. So our technology provides a platform on which we’re going to develop a whole series of further devices. And that enabled him to prototype and get a handheld version ready for us to start progressing and testing very quickly indeed. And of course, then, as soon as he did that, the rest of the team jumped on board as well. Nothing like this exists on the market today. So to have a hand-held axial length meter that makes no contact with the eye and takes a reading super quickly is completely game-changing. 

So over here is our wall of plastic. We’ve got eight prototypes. There’s been 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 perimeter into a fully hand-held, non-contact, non-tethered prototype. So we have 3D-printed enclosures and 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 mould the enclosure. At this point, the technology became more mature, we were ready to evolve. And you can see here the slight difference between these injection-moulded components. Well, the difference was that this is when we started to introduce our custom plastic. Beforehand, we were struggling to get the colour that we wanted – very beige, orange 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, and very bright white polycarbonate that we custom-developed with a partner in Germany.

So here we’ve got our team who are heading up our FLF Project, which is a Future Leaders Fellowship. It’s a grant that we received from Innovate UK, it’s a £1.4m grant. And these guys are doing some really exciting stuff at the cutting edge of optical design. So what they’re doing here is they’re looking into the eye to see what we can see, not setting any kind of boundaries, per se. But let’s do some high-end imaging of the eye and capture all the data we can. And therefore we can investigate lots of other diseases that we could potentially investigate in the future. 

So it’s probably worth having a quick look at this, it’s our midnight room. It’s our secret development room. In there we’ve got Alistair, our Future Leaders Fellowship. So let’s have a knock on to see if he’s in there. [knocks] Hi, Alistair. Can you quickly tell us what you’re working on in there? 

I’m just setting up the pulsed supercontinuum laser. And what does that do, briefly? It produces very short pulses of light that are in the picosecond range, producing pulses from the visible spectrum into the infrared. Sounds like something from Star Wars. Is that what you get told all the time? I get that a lot, yes.

Just like Alistair’s project, we’re working on a bunch of experimental R&D concepts. We don’t know quite where they’re going to lead. But what we do know is the types of imaging techniques that we’re looking into could have really interesting ramifications for disease screening and monitoring. I think one of the things that we all love here about turning up for work is we know that every day we’re going to be working on something super impactful. We know that, as soon as we come through those doors, not only are we going to be working with a great team, but we’re going to be working on technologies that no one has done before, we’re going to be working on devices that don’t exist yet. That motivation is really powerful. Knowing that in the future, these devices can make their way out into the field, we can go into a hospital, and we’ll see patients being measured with these devices in completely new ways, in completely painless ways, which don’t exist at the moment. That’s really motivating.

One of the things that we’re already doing is we’re applying machine learning techniques to the data that we get back from the eye. Through this data, we can spot patterns and we can then start to apply the technology to whole new categories of devices. One of the innovations that we’re looking into at the moment is using the back of the eye, the blood flow, as a proxy for brain blood flow. This could potentially tell us all sorts of information about the state of a patient. In the future, we hope that our technology will be able to measure many more things about patients. We are already having discussions about whether we can look at Alzheimer’s, but also sepsis, and potentially even cholesterol levels as well. I think the future of medicine is already going in the direction of being patient led. I think what we’re seeing more and more is that it’s not good enough for medical devices just to be made in isolation. It’s not good enough for them to just be made for clinicians. The patient experience is really important. We get better patient outcomes with devices that are designed with patients in mind.

Now, you heard about the wall of plastic and how Occuity’s designs have evolved over the years. Well, to create the intricate and visually striking designs they pride themselves on, Occuity uses PTC’s CAD solution, Onshape. Occuity is a new user of Onshape. We’ve spoken previously about Onshape. But can you give us an overview of the software and how it helps companies get started quickly and offers an easy way to get set up?

Yes. Onshape is the world’s first and only truly cloud-native CAD and PDM system. It offers a modern approach to product design and collaboration. Onshape allows engineers, designers, manufacturers, and supply chains to create, edit, share, and manage release 3D models, drawings, and simulation results renderings in real-time from any device and location without the need for any special hardware, software installations, worries about versions, etc. So it’s more powerful than traditional systems and eliminates all the hassles of traditional systems. 

One of the main reasons why Onshape is so easy to set up is we’re entirely cloud native. That means there’s no software to install, maintain or upgrade. None at all. All you need is a web browser and an internet connection on any kind of computer, or you don’t even need a computer at all. You can use a mobile phone, tablet, iPhone, iPad, or Android, you start using Onshape right away. This approach eliminates the need for wasted extra IT resources, it eliminates hardware investments and worries, software installations – these can be time-consuming and costly. And in today’s world, those things are an obstacle to changing who’s on your team quickly – your supply chain, your employees or contractors, whatever. You need to be able to move fast there, and Onshape enables that.

Joint Innovation is key to Occuity. They value being at the forefront of technology and achieving a greater position to lead a revolution in their particular market in their field. So how does Onshape help them focus more on product development, and then less on that back office function? Can you give us some examples there? 

Yeah, there are so many ways Onshape helps them spend more time on design innovation. First, we have extremely fast and live version control and collaboration, design review – all that happens almost instantly in Onshape. So it lets companies work faster and be more agile. And that means that they work in real-time. So they’re collaborating in real-time. That’s another key aspect is that everyone on the team, no matter where they are on Earth, no matter what device they’re on, in real-time they see their other team members working on the same design simultaneously. This feature eliminates the need for time-wasting file transfers, for old-fashioned complex version control like locking and checkout, and manual updates. Forget about all that. All the changes in design are updated instantly across all team members, no matter what device they’re on: that’s Onshape. This live version control means that for every edit you make you can go back to, so it’s easy to track changes, it’s so easy to go back to previous versions, and collaborate on different versions, that people design more fearlessly. Teams that want to move fast, and try ideas, they’ll just make that change. They’re not worried about overwriting a version or having to go through some complicated locking and checkout. One of my colleagues on the team, says they design fearlessly. 

Another key aspect of Onshape is instant collaboration cues and commenting. So our reviewing system allows people to add comments; to see who’s in the document, and then add comments, and those comments and suggestions and markups are right in the context of the design at that moment. This feature means everyone is collaborating and communicating very effectively. And finally, another point I wanted to bring up is Onshape’s cloud-native platform, which lets team members make design changes quickly – whether it’s a part model or assembly model, but also rendering, simulation – soon, Onshape, or CAM as well, all of those things, use the PDM and collaboration features too. So it’s not just about creating the shape. It’s about testing, refining, rendering, and manufacturing. And we have a third-party partner network that can also put data in that can be managed and collaborated. All those benefits of Onshape’s core platform accrue to all aspects of testing and refining designs.