SURGLASSES, a biotech startup based in Taichung, has introduced smart surgical glasses and dissecting tables in recent years, with sales of some product lines growing multiple times. According to Wang Min-liang, CEO of SURGLASSES, understanding competitive products in the market and leveraging Taiwan's hardware and software talents along with the supply chain contribute to the team moving smarter and faster.
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Anatomy is a compulsory course for medical students, and with technological advancements, it is now possible to make gross anatomy, which is not easily accessible and difficult to replicate, more vivid and immediate through online, touchscreen, and interactive methods. Wang Min-liang, who collaborates with distributors, medical schools, and nursing departments, says that compared to the FDA certification required for smart medical devices, the electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) certifications required for dissecting tables are faster to obtain.
SURGLASSES, which provides orthopedic surgical planning, has found its primary customers for dissecting tables to be nursing departments due to the straightforward and convenient application of anatomy, which can be directly incorporated into nursing exams. Additionally, nursing and sports medicine departments outnumber medical departments, offering more scalability in business expansion.
Traditionally, medical anatomy education mainly relied on instruments from the United States and Sweden. However, Wang Min-liang believes that the essence of medical education lies in teaching students basic anatomical concepts while understanding the differences between gross and virtual anatomy. Therefore, SURGLASSES emphasizes enabling students to self-study by integrating archived questions from US anatomy exams, allowing students to practice autonomously in their spare time.
In the smart healthcare industry,Taiwan's ICTsupply ecosystem provides excellent support.
The global market for precision dissecting tables is dominated by three companies from the United States, Sweden, and Taiwan, with SURGLASSES based in Taichung. The complexity of digital content presentation in anatomy requires collaboration among nurses, physicians, and software developers, making the entry barrier relatively high. Wang Min-liang emphasizes that understanding medical data and integrating Taiwan's ICT capabilities are essential elements that enable Taiwan Bone King to thrive globally.
While SURGLASSES may not directly compete with the 15-year-old US companies in the field of "virtual humans" or the 9-year-old Swedish teams in pure medical imaging, it integrates the functionalities of both and provides customized fine-tuning, leveraging Taiwan's niche in the supply chain to offer cost-effective hardware and software integration solutions.
Analyzing the competition from US teams, Wang Min-liang points out that while US companies use CT scans to finely segment tissues and approach the subtlety of real humans, the process is time-consuming and costly, as the CT images require medical anatomy professionals to annotate them, which is labor-intensive and expensive.
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