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One of the most exciting developments in technology currently emerging the field service sector is the potential of Augmented Reality and at the vanguard driving the technology forward is US based company Help Lightning, with their own take on the tech ‘Mobile Merged Reality’. Kris Oldland spoke to founder Bart Guthrie to find out more about the origins of the technology and just how big it could potentially become...

Help Lightning has been a technology that has been causing conversations for some time now amongst field service organisations in the USA, fuelled primarily by a number of appearances by their charismatic founder Dr. Bart Guthrie on the US conference circuit alongside some slick booth demonstrations.

But what exactly is a neurosurgeon doing disrupting the field service technology space? I caught up with Guthrie at Field Service Medical in San Diego to find out more about the background on how Help Lightning was born.

 

“Early on when I started practicing, even during my training I it became apparent to me that there were opportunities for both technology and certain relationships to improve processes that could sustain or improve health.” Guthrie begins

“The earliest thing I became involved in was image-guided surgery. That is where you take a CT or CAT scan and you use the device to register to the patient’s head in surgery and then as you do the surgery you can see what you are doing on the MRI cast.”

“So I think what that did for me was to open my eyes to the capability of technology to bring information to bear and then after that I became pretty heavily involved in medical image distribution. In my field medical imaging is our currency. It is information dense and we will use it to make most of our decisions to get outcomes in terms of certain things that we do so we developed a system to acquire and manage medical imaging and formed a company around that which did very well.”

“Then right about that time when visualisation in the operating room was becoming usable – endoscopes, microscopes, video cameras and then this notion of connectivity... It’s one thing to have an operating microscope that is high res. but if you can’t connect it to anything you’re only as good as you.”

“So that started coming around I began thinking would it be possible to use connectivity to export information, whether that be medical information or guidance and movement.”

 

“We approached the Department of Energy about a call for technology development they issued around surgical robots and we got funding for around $1M for a pilot scheme. Needless to say the funds were completely insufficient but surgical robots are remarkable.”

“They are in the field, they work and they do what they are supposed to do which is take your movements, then gear it down and they’ll effectively make the same movement. They are going to be tremendously valuable.”

“For us though there were some limitations to the robot. One you can’t teach it very well, there is a time delay, there were all these technical issues that separate you from what is going on. And the other thing in my job is that I am constantly getting requests about remote calls with patients that have a problem. And those patients end up in healthcare systems that have the skills but not the experience.”

We have been speaking for barely a few minutes yet it is clear that Guthrie has a clear passion for technology and its ability to enhance the world we live in. As you would expect, he has the gentle tones of a experienced medical consultant, enhanced further by his soft Alabama accent.

However, he also clearly has a mind built for problem solving and out of the box thinking and it is this skill that led him to the concept of what was to become Help Lightning, the development of which was a direct response to a major problem Guthrie saw in his day to day working life.

Namely getting expertise where it is needed in an emergency situation.

As Guthrie explains “Any of the surgeons in a small hospital where someone has been in an automobile accident for example will know how to make an incision, how to sow, how to support a patient. But any surgeon may not know how to do that in the brain, or in the heart etc."

“Yet the movements and the principals are very similar, you just need the experience. So we started thinking about the idea of somehow capturing the experience of someone who has that skill set and transmitting it real time to a local task-force.”

“We came up with this idea of bi-directional video and if we could capture the remote task field view, look at it, insert instruments, hands, whatever, interact with it and then combine the two and distribute it back that may solve the problem.”

 

“It would allow us to impart a little bit more expertise remotely. It wouldn’t solve everything but it would be advancement over what we could do for example over a telephone, which is the standard conveyor of medical information remotely right now.”

And so Help Lightning was born (albeit originally under a different moniker of VIPAR) and with the support of his mechanical engineering and computer science departments at UAB the concept soon became a reality with pilots in operating rooms in both UAB and the Veterans Hospital.

In its initial configuration VIPAR (an acronym of Virtual Interactive Presence and Augmented Reality) was a high-end manifestation that worked superbly but simply wasn’t scalable.

So after the patents were written Guthrie took the concept and founded Help Lightning and sought to develop a lighter-weight version of the concept.

Modestly he states: “I procured enough funding to get it going and I sort of stepped back out of the way and hired a bunch of just excellent people to get it going and they’ve reduced the concept to a similar functionality on just a mobile device.”

What is certain however, is that the team Guthrie has put in place, headed up by CEO Drew Deaton, have done a quite remarkable job of scaling the technology down to an app - which of course makes the business incredibly scalable itself.

“It achieves a couple of things,” Guthrie explains when discussing the move to an app based approach.

 

“It gets this team out of the hardware business and it makes it available ubiquitously.”

So with the team and technology in place the challenge now is identifying the markets that Help lightning is best suited for. Given the origins of the product clinical care is of course one of those, and Guthrie is directly involved with the pilot program.

“That presentation I gave here where I presented those pilots was the very first step in trying to understand will the patients accept it? Will the providers accept is it? Will we find things at the physical visit that we didn’t find at the virtual visit. Or vice versa – is it safe or is it unsafe?”

Of course these same questions will apply to the initial projects within the field service space as well.

However, the potential for cost savings of using a tool such a Help Lightning could be truly remarkable. Particularly for those companies whose engineers have to travel long distances.

Indeed Help Lightning or other similar tools could have a huge impact on the way companies structure their field services workforce.

With the ability to dial experience in from a remote location to provide the key knowledge and expertise required for a complicated maintenance or repair job, it could make sense for companies to have their most experienced engineers in one office centrally and utilise cheaper, local technicians when it comes to remote locations?

 

Or simply it could be a tool to improve engineers work life-balance, whilst reducing the costs of travel and accommodation.

Another alternative could be to implement a new tier of service offering based around remote assistance whereby the engineer guides the customer themselves through maintenance?

Certainly the applications in field service are wide reaching.

“The way I see it is its all about the relationship you have,” Guthrie explains.

“If you just take two people as a construct and their relationship is remote and some kind of expertise or procedural expertise has to be conveyed from one to the other it’s a natural fit.”

“So any market where there is an existing relationship that is benefited by the transmission of expertise to a remote site in a manner that facilitates the relationship, that engages both people, I think is a natural market.”

“I feel patient care is a natural fit, field service is a natural fit. I think maybe the space shuttle even, wherever there is that kind of dynamic in the relationship, I think this concept could fit.”

 

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We look at what Help Lightning are terming Mobile Merged Reality, An innovative mobile solution goes beyond augmented reality (AR) to redefine the future of help...

I need to be able to...

This commonly heard phrase fuels new ideas, creative thinking and innovation which often start many successful companies. A prominent Neurosurgeon, Dr. Bart Guthrie, used this phrase in frustration as he found his task list growing ever longer and more complex.

He needed superpowers to be able to consult on cases, prep support staff, collaborate with other physicians in surgery and meet with patients — in other buildings, in homes, in offices across town, across the state, even in other countries, all on the same day, often in the same hour.

Given the expense and reimbursement issues in health care, he needed an innovation that wouldn’t cost an arm or a leg or require brain surgery to operate. As a result, instant, virtual presence was born. In fact, it was the genesis for a new product category for superior service and knowledge exchange called mobile merged reality. With over 15,000 users in 50 countries, Help Lightning’s patented technologies and processes made it the global leader in merged reality. Augmented reality technology combines live video or a user’s environment with computer-generated digital information in real time.

Merged reality goes beyond AR.

 

It merges two users’ real-time mobile video and audio streams, along with visual inputs from a growing array of tools and modes included with the app. Mobile merged reality allows video interactions to have similar characteristics to in-person interactions, adding interlaced hand movement, gestures, visual clues, real remote objects, telestration, drawing, pointing and pictures. Adding gestures and nonverbal clues substantially improves speed of understanding, resulting in an enhanced recipient/customer perception of overall experience. Instant, accurate communication augmented by mobile merged reality and virtual presence can have a dramatic impact on service operations.

 

You can proactively, efficiently and effectively attack hard costs that plague the efficiency and effectiveness of operations and customer interactions. Customers can experience a 7 to 15 times hard cost savings for every dollar invested.

Expert personnel can see a 10 to 20% increases in efficiency. According to the Aberdeen Group 33% of service work orders require a second trip. Merged reality and virtual presence is able to help eliminate 18% of second trips that are required due to a lack of experience, alleviate 19% of second trips caused by limited access to information, and avoid 28% of second trips caused by wrong diagnoses.

Quickly solve problems for customers, assist newly on-boarded personnel, eliminate wasteful trips and differentiate the way your products are sold, implemented and serviced. Technical, healthcare, manufacturing, and service experts can show a resolution, not just describe it, even when thousands of miles away. Visually collaborate, assist with issues, and resolve problems as though you were working side-byside with a colleague or customer. Download the app for any iOS or Android mobile device and start helping and sharing ideas instantly. No additional special equipment is needed to start a merged reality session.

 

Once you’re in a merged reality call with a colleague, customer or friend, tap to change how you interact. Choose whether you’re giving or receiving help, and start collaborating in seconds. Merged reality adds missing visual cues, gestures, and non-verbal communication methods to any session. If you’ve selected Give Help, simply place your hand behind your device. You’ll see your hand appear on top of your colleague’s image. For best results, use a white background such as a wall or piece of paper. Telestrate, freeze images, use hand gestures, pictures and even add real objects into the merged reality scene.

 

If you selected Receive Help, position your iPhone, iPad or Android device over something you’re working on, like a circuit. When the person you need help from reaches behind his or her device, you’ll instantly see the other person’s hand (or anything that is necessary to help) appear merged with your normal image view. Dr. Guthrie uses Help Lightning’s merged reality solution on a regular basis.

However, applications of merged reality and virtual presence are not limited to healthcare settings. The uses are endless; from live knowledge exchange to never before imagined consumer experiences. Giving better, faster help and care for customers, friends and colleagues is universal. By using ordinary smart phones and tablets, users add non-verbal, visual cues and critical human gestures to video calls for superior communication, collaboration and cognition.

Welcome to the future. Instant help anywhere in the world.

We call it Help Lightning.

 

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Sister show to Field Service USA, Field Service Fall brings three days of industry education to the East Coast of the USA. Field Service News Editor-in-Chief Kris Oldland flew over to see what the latest hot buttons for the US service industry were…

Held in Buckhead, the upmarket business region of Atlanta Field Service Fall lived up to it’s billing as one of the key US events in the field service calendar by bringing together some 200 plus senior members of the field service industry across the three day event.

As always with industry events focussing on field service operations the delegates came from a range of disparate industries including healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications and more, yet despite coming from seemingly different universes, the same pain points were discussed, the same opportunities for improvement of service delivery discovered and the same challenges of implementing such opportunities and overcoming these pain points were at the heart of the conversations.

Kristina Hill, IFS Marketing Manager Enterprise Service Manager commented “As always the WBR field service events bring a great crowd of multiple different verticals together to brainstorm and share thought leadership and discuss pain points”

“It brings all sorts of companies together” Hill added “but as different as they are and as different as they run process wise, they are also very similar in their pain points and the issues they face. It’s great to see people working on new initiatives and adopting new technology”

This sentiment was echoed by John Callen Support Solutions Manager, NCR who was attending for his seventh time at a WBR Field Service Event.

“Every time I come here I get take aways from each presenter or each conversation I have, that makes me just that little bit better in my role” Callen stated, going on to say “I’ve got about twenty things with stars on them so I can’t possibly implement them all but I’m going to review again tonight and go from there.”

 

Indeed there was a real sense of community across the three days in Atlanta. Something that event producers WBR are keen to maintain and build upon.

Jonathan Massoud, Divisional Director & Market Analyst, of conference organiser WBR commented “The feedback that we got was that it is good to bring the community together and here is where they can get help to develop standards that they typically can’t get elsewhere, that they can’t get through benchmarking or through competitors so they can come together here, meet and increase their own community.”

It was this opportunity to discuss challenges amongst his peers that attracted Arnold Benavidez, Field service engineering Manager, Metso Recycling to attend for the first time also.

“One of the reasons I came to this event was to get different perspectives on how other field service organisations are managing their field service activities for their businesses. “ Benavidez commented, “What processes, technologies and strategies are they implementing that have been proven and been successful in the organisations.”

“Quite often I think we try to manage the chaos in our service organisations and we tend to have tunnel vision in just managing our way through that chaos. I wanted to come through this event to broaden my perspective and really get a good observation of what are the other possibilities that could improve my organisation and our overall business.”

 

The conference agenda itself was well balanced with a strong blend of forward looking presentations, case studies detailing how some of the more progressive companies within the industry have made improvements to their own service operations and general insight and opinion from a number of senior figures within the service industry.

One of the topics that dominated a lot of the presentations as well as conversations in the break out sessions was that of IoT.

As Massoud explained “One of the things we are hearing about now is the digitization of service in terms of the Internet of Things – what does that mean? Last year we talked about that and people were unsure of how to move forward, now it seems that each of the verticals now have things in place that are addressing that and we are seeing things move forward.”

“For example some organisations are putting in mobile boxes when the product goes out so they can pull data off it and that is just one example of how IoT is effecting the development of their products and their service and that’s come out this week.“

Callen also highlighted IoT as one of the big topics of the conference saying “I think a lot of the themes that I’ve heard this time around is around the Internet of Things, the way things are pushing forward it makes you think how I can implement this to solve problems of my own?”

 

“You’ve got to worry about the cost but you’ve also got to worry about the cost of fixing the problem,” he added

However, the talk wasn’t all about tech. The continuing drive towards improving customer experience was another frequently heard topic of conversation.

“The real focus still, which is nice to hear, is in delighting the customers” Hill commented “As customer demand grows and increases and the technology that is out there from a customer perspective makes that demand higher, I think that field service organisations are realising that they have to keep up and then they have to deliver in a way that is going to put the customer first. “

“That’s still a big trend and one of the things that was a big conversation topic is that the customer has to come first and then let the processes be driven by that.” She added.

Expanding further on the topic Massoud added “Customer experience has been top of the line for the last couple of years now in the research we are doing.

What we are seeing now is how companies using technology to improve the customer experience.”

“The shift towards having the field tech be more of a consultant in the field, soft skills developing, really jumped out again. I think it is something that the industry has been struggling with for a while but now they are starting to put some things in place and some training in place where they are making headway with technicians. So knowledge bases we’re hearing about all the way up to augmented reality type solutions, which also tie into knowledge management and knowledge sharing in the field.”

 

And in fact the absolute star turn of the three days was provided by Augmented Reality solution Help Lightning.

Developed in part by neurosurgeon Bart Guthrie, Help Lightning uses augmented reality to deliver remote guidance. The impact for field service of augmented reality is massive, potentially slashing a phenomenal amount of outgoing costs by allowing experienced engineers to guide local onsite engineers on how to make a fix themselves, instead of having to get the experienced engineer onsite.

A simple, yet highly effective app, with slick delivery and seemingly robust connectivity (the product is capable of working across 3G networks despite being video based) Help Lightning was certainly the star of the show garnering a lot interest.

 

And with an engaging presentation by Guthrie supported by a constantly busy booth in the demonstration zone of the event, Help Lightning certainly won a number of fans across the three days including Marty Jost, Director of Technical Services, Hach who commented “The biggest thing for me was seeing the Help Lightning application. It’s simple enough that I want to go back and demo it for my people.”

Benavidez was also a fan of the augmented reality app stating “I was really impressed with some of the technology, specifically with Help Lightning, we’re coming currently on a second year of a down market in our industry due to the price of steel and a lot of people are looking at services to bring in revenue to make up for the difference, but selling services is difficult, as our customers tend to want to take care of those type of things on their own, so I think after seeing this technology from Help Lightning this may provide the opportunity to assist our customers who don’t want to pay the premium price of having a highly skilled technician on site but perhaps would be interested in having our technician guide their electrical or mechanical contractors on site to help facilitate some minor repairs.”

Indeed if the general consensus of the attendees of Field Service Fall are a good yardstick to go by then the team at Help Lightning, and Augmented Reality vendors in general could well become the hot ticket in Field Service in the very near future as the technology promises very obvious benefits for customers and field service providers alike.

“I think our customers could really go for that kind of opportunity because we are helping them be more self-sufficient and ultimately that is what they want to do.” Benavidez explained “I felt really confident when I saw that opportunity. I think it is definitely something I’m going to try.” He added.

However whilst IoT, Big Data and Augmented Reality are truly exciting topics quite rightly discussed frequently both in the trade press and at industry events such as this, it is also important not to overlook the fundamental technology such as scheduling and parts management tools that can help us get the right engineer to the right job at the right time, and getting them there with the right tools to do the job first time.

What always fascinates me personally about field service as a topic for conversation is that often whilst we have a natural tendency to focus on how we can harness the latest technology to streamline and improve the productivity of our operations, yet there still remain fundamental basics that we must implement if we are to meet the expectations our customers demand.

Therefore it was interesting to see that the problem of parts and inventory management was a pain point that continued to surface during the breakout sessions across the three days.

 

Whilst many of the conversations would have been driven by a series of roundtables hosted by Aberdeen’s Aly Pinder, the fact that this was an area that resonated with many was a clear indicator of the importance of getting the basics right.

As Deb Geiger, VP Global Marketing Astea commented;

“I think there is always an underlying commonality in terms of everybody is trying to optimise be more efficient and reducing those costs but also not at the risk of sacrificing, customer satisfaction. “

“People talk about speed and quick resolution, but you can show up quickly and not fix it first time. So its always weighing the different factors and ensuring that the piece of equipment is getting fixed first time and that the customer is satisfied. I think everybody is looking to continually optimise, look at their processes – how can they improve how do they optimise their workforce, some are having to do more work with less resources how do they make that happen without overtaxing the technicians.”

Of course what events such as Field Service Fall do is provide an opportunity not only for discovery, and peer networking but also for benchmarking how your organisation is performing in terms of delivering service.

As Callen wryly put it “Every one of us is in the same circus we just have different clowns working for us. My problems are the same things as the guy that has the printing press, as the guy that has the medical devices.”

 

“Operational wise and personal wise this is a great opportunity to benchmark progress. I’ve seen a lot of the same folks year after year. It’s good to see old friends. Here I’ve got friends that I talk to every year, what did you guys do with this, what did you guys do with that? We talk about problems and situations. And it genuinely helps us see where we are in terms of our own development”

This is something that Massoud is equally aware of and very much proud to be part of adding “It’s an opportunity that is unique for this space and you can’t go at it alone.”

‘A lot of guys tell us that when they first come here I’m coming back - it’s good to be part of this community”

In that case I guess I’ll see you all next year then.

 

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Registration for field service fall 2016 is now open click here for more info

 

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