Today I’m going to talk you about a particular use case of mixed reality: scientific laboratories. Wear your white coat and your protective goggles, because I’m going to tell you how Holo4Labs is giving scientists superpowers thanks to mixed reality.
What is Holo4Labs?
Holo4Labs is a solution developed by Poland-based company Solution4Labs (together with its parent company TenderHut and its partner SoftwareHut) that aims in improving the efficiency of scientific lab workers thanks to Microsoft HoloLens.
Performing a scientific experiment is not as easy as it seems in the movies: it usually requires performing various analysis and measurements using different instruments, following a very strict procedure. The scientists have to wear gloves and operate complicate instruments with care, so every other task that requires them to use their hands, forces them to pause the operations, and so to waste time.
Usually, a research project requires the collaboration between multiple people, sometimes even from different countries, whose experiments together lead to the final result. And the more this collaboration is complicated, the more the results will be obtained later in time.
Holo4Labs aims exactly at solving these and other problems exploiting Microsoft HoloLens. Current version works with HoloLens 1 (since it is the only one on the market), but there is already a new version ready to work with the more comfortable HoloLens 2, and it will be released together with the effective distribution of the new device.
When was it born
The idea behind Holo4Labs came up in 2015, when current Solution4Labs’s CEO tested the HoloLens 1. At that time, the startup was in the laboratory business, so the team knew well the problems arising in labs. It was essentially a “1+1” kind of moment for him.
Functionalities
Let me tell you what is the full set of features of Holo4Labs and why they are useful for scientists. Since I don’t work in a lab, I asked to a smart scientist that I know some questions about lab life and if and how Holo4Labs can really be useful.
Integration with Thermo Fisher Scientific SampleManagerTM LIMS
When I went on Holo4Labs website, I read everywhere that Solution4Labs is proud that the product is integrated with Thermo Fisher Scientific SampleManager LIMS. I was like “ehm, ok… and… so?”. I then sent the link to my smart scientist and she answered me with “Oh, wow, they are Thermo Fisher resellers! That’s cool!”, so, I suppose this is an amazing thing for people in the field.
It seems that Thermo Fisher is a popular brand of scientific instruments and it offers a brand-agnostic software called SampleManager that is a LIMS, that is a Laboratory Information Management Software. This software is as well very popular inside laboratories and it is like an ERP for labs. It is useful for managing the resources, the stock, the various instruments in the lab; it manages the barcodes associated with the samples in the laboratory; it memorizes all the steps of the various experiments; it can connect to all the instruments in the room, and so manage all their results; and many many other features (you can check them out here, if you want).
Connecting with SampleManager via Wi-Fi, Holo4Labs lets scientists access all the enormous data that SampleManager handles for the laboratory, hands free, in mixed reality. This is what gives scientists the superpowers, as we’ll see shortly.
Connection with all the instruments of the laboratory
Thanks to its integration with SampleManager, Holo4Labs can directly connect with all the instruments of the lab that have some kind of connection (WiFi, Bluetooth, usb, Ethernet/LAN, RS232).
This means that for instance, a scientist can be directly notified in front of his/her eyes about the status of an ongoing analysis. So if he/she is working with an instrument and wants to check out what is happening with another analysis that is happening on the other side of the lab, he/she can do that easily, without moving. And if the experiment on the other instrument is going bad, it can also be stopped remotely on the fly.
This leads to a lot of time saving, of course.
Procedure following and manuals
Inside the SampleManager it is possible to insert all the procedure that the lab worker has to perform, so all the steps that have to be made to complete the experiment, from the start to the end. This is taken by this app in mixed reality, so the scientist can see in front of his/her eyes what is the current stage that is performing and what are the next ones. For the current stage, there will be all the step-by-step instructions to perform it. This way, the system can follow the worker during all the procedure and this will lead to less errors in performing the procedures.
In case there is the need to consult a manual, it is possible to extract it from the LIMS and show it in front of the eyes of the worker, in AR. This is of a great advantage, especially for newbies in the labs, that have not enough experience with using the instruments or on the lab procedures. The learning curve is made easier.
And in case that even manual is not enough, well, Microsoft comes to help thanks to the HoloLens browser, that can be opened to perform a Google Search when needed (it will try to open Bing, but, ehm…)
Samples scanning
As you see in all the movies, the labs are always full of little bottles full of samples of chemical substances. Of course, you have to know exactly what there is in these bottles… if you take the wrong one for an experiment, maybe you make the lab to explode :D.
That’s why in big labs, the samples are tagged with barcodes (e.g. QR Codes) that embed what is contained in the glass. With Holo4Labs, it is possible to exploit the cameras of the HoloLens to scan the QR Codes and let you know what is inside every beker in the lab just by putting it in front of your eyes, without having to ask other people or look manually in a database. This means less explosions in labs 😀
Notes taking
While a scientist is performing an experiment, and the system is following him/her step-by-step, he/she can also add some vocal notes related to the experiment he/she is performing in the LIMS system.
I admit I was mostly ignoring this feature, but the scientist that I consulted told me that it is overly important. She told me that usually scientists, when they perform experiments, have a notebook on which they write everything they do. This doesn’t only serve for remembering what they are doing, but it is fundamental to take down all the data on the procedure so that to write the publication on the experiment later on. And if there is the idea of patenting the process, this is even more important, since it serves as a guide to write the patent… and the date and time written on the lab notebook can be used to prove that you are the first inventor of something if multiple labs in the world want to patent it at the same time.
So, notes taking is not optional, it is mandatory. But having to write stuff on a notebook is a true nuisance: you don’t know where to put the notebook, since the lab is always dirty of chemicals… and then if you’re using your hands to handle an instrument, you have to pause the experiment, remove the gloves, write the notes, put the gloves on again… that’s annoying and a waste of time. With HoloLens and SampleManager together, this is super-easy: you just speak to add a note, and the speech-to-text system will translate it to a textual note. I guess that you have still to use the old method in some special cases, when you want for instance to draw something on the notebook, but most of the time, this won’t be needed anymore… also because the system can already take photo and video notes.
Remote collaboration
There have already been written thousands of articles on the web on how AR and VR can make collaboration between distant people in the world easier, so I won’t go into many details in this.
Holo4Labs lets you connect with other people working on the same project, with the possibility of having also videocalls if you need consulting another member on a particular step you are performing. This is very important especially for projects that span teams around multiple states (e.g. for EU grants, that require collaboration between different EU countries).
UX
This is the point I am a bit skeptical about regarding Holo4Labs. HoloLens is an innovative device, but it has some serious limitations, like a limited field of view and an interaction system based on the air-tap gesture that is mostly unusable. Using it inside a real lab, it can surely introduce some problems: for instance, how do you see the manuals of the instruments with that little FOV?
Solution4Labs answered me that yes, HoloLens can’t offer the best UX ever. They noticed this problem when they started developing the solution, that started with a fixed interface in front of the user. It showed potential, but it was hardly usable, so they asked the sibling company ExtraHut to develop a proper UI.
That’s why now there is the possibility for the user to move the virtual elements that he/she have in front of him/her by pinching and dragging… so that they can be naturally positioned where they can be viewed in an optimal way. Furthermore, now the interface relies more on vocal commands, exactly to avoid to continuously pinching in the air. Screaming commands like “STOP” and seeing an instrument on the other side of the lab to stop, will let you feel like a magician.
With the advent of HoloLens 2, that brings a bigger FOV and working natural interactions (plus eye tracking), Holo4Labs will offer a new interface, that will be more natural and that will exploit the amazing features of the new device by Microsoft.
Application fields
Holo4Labs can be useful in all those environments where there is a laboratory used to run experiments, like for instance:
- Universities;
- Fuel industry;
- Chemical industry;
- Pharmaceutical industry;
- Food industry;
- Etc…
Awards
Holo4Labs has just won Emerging Europe 2019’s award for Best Innovation initiative of 2019. After reading all of this, I think that the award is absolutely deserved for what they are doing to innovate the work of scientists in the labs.
As you can see, Holo4Labs is a very interesting B2B product that aims at improving the efficiency of lab workers by using mixed reality. I want to compliment with Solution4Labs for this smart solution and thank its CEO Paweł Gawkowski, for having helped me in understanding this product that is in a field that I don’t work very well.
This product confirms once again how XR technologies are already mature for the use in enterprise environments and how they are making companies spare time and money in many verticals, even the ones we can’t think about.
(Header image by Solution4Labs)
Full disclaimer: This has been a paid post, and there has been a monetary compensation for writing and publishing it on this blog. The “paid” tag means that I charged money gave priority to this post over other topics and other tasks I have to do.
I decided to write it because I sincerely think that the Holo4Labs product is interesting and I wrote this post following my usual quality standards. I also have been lucky to find a company that let me offer a high-quality sponsored post that follows all the rules required by laws and by Internet etiquette.
I am also interested in hearing your feedback on sponsored posts on this blog: don’t hesitate to contact me to tell me if you like them or not.