Angel investor and media producer Will Phillips explores two groundbreaking SRI-born projects in his mini-documentary on the Bay Area startup scene.
On his growing YouTube channel, investor and producer Will Phillips aims to provide a raw, unfiltered look at the early-stage founders who are building the startups of the future.
In his most recent episode, he stopped by SRI to explore how one of Silicon Valley’s founding institutions continues to fuel invention and industry disruption.
Sam Frishman — founder and CEO of Medical Devices Corner, a startup building on a close collaboration with SRI — explains to Phillips why he’s creating a remote-controlled robotic arm that will allow physicians to perform surgeries within an MRI machine. MRI-guided procedures like biopsies and ablations are critical to certain kinds of cancer care. Yet, as TechCrunch reports, “The current process entails putting the patient into a machine to get an image, before pulling them out to advance a needle one centimeter at a time. It’s a time-consuming and frankly inefficient use of resources.”
In his conversation with Phillips, Frishman demonstrates the extreme sensitivity of MRC’s prototype by giving himself a remotely controlled shave with a straight razor.
Phillips also investigates SRI’s XRGo robotic teleoperation system, a cutting-edge platform with profound implications in areas like biomedical research.
“SRI created the da Vinci surgical robot,” explains Bill Rusitzky, SRI’s vice president of business development. “We’ve now extended that to telemanipulation: Remote control of robot arms in areas where you can’t automate, but where it’s too hard or too expensive or too dangerous to put people.”
Guided by SRI’s experts, Phillips ends his exploration of Silicon Valley by experiencing first-hand the newest evolution of SRI’s XRGo system: an exciting synthesis between XRGo and Sony’s Spatial Reality Display that removes the need for VR goggles, enabling users to perform precise telemanipulation using a glasses-free 3D display.
Learn more about Medical Devices Corner, explore our XRGo solution, or contact us.
