We often speak about design and lifecycle management complexity of products in automotive, aerospace, defense industries. But what about probably the most complex product – our body? The debates about our ability to understand human body are fascinating and inspiring. Many new technologies were created for the last decades to improve our knowledge and ability to threat our bodies. Would be able to design our bodies using CAD systems in the same way we do it for cars and airplanes?
Over the weekend, my attention was caught by news article about startup Klarismo making 3D model of our body. Backed by few high profile investors from Silicon Valey and founded by ex-Googlers, it seems to me an interesting attempt to create a way to navigate our body at least similar to how we can do navigate using Google Maps. Navigate to read an article – Klarismo, A Service That Makes A 3D Model Of The Inside Of Your Body, Raises $2.1M.
Klarismo is an online service where users are able to take a much deeper look at their body’s internal structure. It takes MRI scans and other kinds of scans that people are getting already and then uses that to build a 3D model of the person. That 3D model is then available online, where users can take a look at how their bodies have changed over time — from muscle growth and fat reduction to other things, like what their spleen looks like.
However, the most exciting part for me was the following one:
“The hypothesis is, if you build a homogeneous dataset of hundreds of thousands or millions of scans, theres gonna be some pretty interesting stuff you can do with that,” Foster said. “Our approach is, how do we get to big numbers like that? We need to build a consumer product basically. And that’s how we came up with this.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjcXxkRwlec
So, imaging the big data set of human bodies? Just to think about it can blow your mind.
Klarismo is probably not the only company that thinking about 3D models of human bodies. Dassault Systems – well known as a company that put a huge focus on everything 3D, recently shared information about Living Heart project.
The Living Heart Project is uniting leading cardiovascular researchers, educators, medical device developers, regulatory agencies, and practicing cardiologists on a shared mission to develop and validate highly accurate personalized digital human heart models. These models will establish a unified foundation for cardiovascular in silico medicine and serve as a common technology base for education and training, medical device design, testing, clinical diagnosis and regulatory science —creating an effective path for rapidly translating current and future cutting edge innovations directly into improved patient care.
What is my conclusion? Do you think, CAD systems will support design for our own bodies in the future? Is it something completely unimaginable? 10-15 years ago, to think about mobile devices we have today was like science fiction. We have billions of mobile touch devices in people’s hand these days. Maybe we will explore our own bodies like we do Google street view in 5 years and then start to redesign and fix ourselves? Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
