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

Samantha Johnson is the founder of Tatum Robotics, based at a robotics hub in Seaport, Boston. Tatum Robotics developed the first collaborative, cloud-based robotic hand that can be a lifeline to those who cannot hear or see. The hand features a tendon-driven system with 18 degrees of freedom to give it the necessary dexterity to achieve the hand shapes of American Sign Language. Starting with five degrees of freedom, the team added additional degrees of freedom to make different hand shapes to make sure the design was as optimised as possible. There are millions of deafblind people worldwide, but it’s always difficult to really bring assistive technology forward, says Samantha. “There have been previous projects developing fingerspelling hands or robotics for the deaf or deafblind community, mainly in academia, and nothing’s ever gone through commercialization. A lot of the work that we do here is really making sure that we bridge that gap."

Occuity is using the eye as a window to the health of the body to develop solutions to some of humanity’s greatest healthcare challenges. The PM1 Pachymeter, their first-ever product, measures corneal central thickness: an important measurement when you’re trying to diagnose glaucoma. Indigo on the other hand is their concept for a handheld, portable, non-invasive blood glucose monitor. No longer will people need to draw blood to measure their glucose levels. Design engineer Jamie Serjant says that one of the things the team loves about turning up for work is that they know that every day they come into work, they know they will 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.”

M&S are retail leaders when it comes to women’s wear, and it’s an important focus for the company. The M&S clothing brand has also gone through a lot of iterations through it’s 100-year history, now focusing on future tech and sustainability. Richard Price, Managing Director of Clothing, Home and Beauty at M&S speaks more about this: “We've got 40 percent market share of the bra market. We've led with women's wear because it is the business unit that does lead in terms of style perception. We are currently in the process of implementing new planning systems, new merchandising systems. It's really important now that we've got end to end traceability, and that can only be done through technology, utilizing the technology that both we have and that the factories have, and that the mills have, so that we can make sure that all of our products [sic] is completely traceable..

Eight Sleep's flagship product is the Pod mattress, an intelligent cooling and heating system for your bed. Eight Sleep's technical program manager, Harry Xiao, gets a lot of personal gratification from allowing people to achieve a great nights sleep. “What we do at Eight Sleep…there is this really key sensing technology, but on the other hand, we can do something about it through an actuation mechanism. And that way we can collect the data and then use our technologies to then change something, which is the temperature in which you sleep. And ultimately that feedback loop means the outcome is no longer just a piece of data from a sensor, but it's the feeling that you feel so much more refreshed or it's like "hey, I feel great because I've had good sleep" or "hey, I feel so much better about my day because I have good sleep". And to me, that outcome is just so much more impactful and so much more meaningful than just a bunch of numbers on a page.”