Through the Creators Circle, healthcare entrepreneurs and creative professionals will come together to bring game-changing ideas to market
What do healthcare tools look like? Are they a sturdy grey walker, a plain white continuous diabetes monitor, or a bulky plastic boot for a fracture?
Or are they something else entirely: An immersive virtual reality set that lets people with dementia swim with dolphins, a fashionable shirt that monitors asthma symptoms, or an entertaining video game that makes people want to do rehab exercises?
KITE Creates is working towards that second vision with its new venture development program, the Creators Circle. It connects design and creative tech professionals with healthcare entrepreneurs.
“We’re opening our doors [at KITE] with an open call for creators to bring their expertise, knowledge and talents to help us solve very real healthcare challenges,” says Garrick Ng, KITE Creates program lead. “It’s a chance for people who come from these different worlds to share their perspectives and learn from each other.”
The Creators Circle will invite people from media creation, virtual and augmented reality, VFX and animation, gaming, fashion, product design or AI to collaborate with health researchers and entrepreneurs developing new health ventures or bringing their products to market.
It’s a bit like an incubator with a twist, Ng says, with a focus on participants growing as healthcare entrepreneurs and incorporating new points of view on aspects like technological approach, design and user experience or market fit.
“Their first experience will be pitching their current solution and approach to a diverse panel of creatives and industry mentors. Getting that feedback early and opening them up to other creative possibilities and collaboration opportunities will hopefully put them on a better commercialization path,” Ng says.
Creative professionals, for their part, will get the chance to work with their healthcare matches at various levels, from mentoring to being full partners in the companies.
In some ways, KITE Creates itself is a microcosm of its mission to connect scientists developing healthcare products with creative industry talent. It’s powered by the KITE Research Institute, which is part of Toronto’s University Health Network and focuses on rehabilitation, disability, illness and aging. And Ng has a creative, business and social impact background, having previously worked at Artscape, and an MBA in business and sustainability.
In addition to the Creators Circle, KITE Creates is also hosting events featuring healthcare innovators and creatives. “We’re profiling some examples where the arts and the sciences are colliding in generative ways and creating an opportunity for these people to come together, meet one another and connect,” says Ng.
They include presenters from in and outside healthcare and demo solutions that show how things as diverse as video games or fashion can be woven into health products to make them more intuitive, functional and marketable.
Dr. Lora Appel, CEO of VR health upstart caregiVR, sees the value in these kinds of connections. She has worked hard to find creative professionals to work with in her company over the past few years by doing things like going to creative events to try and find artists. “A lot of my career is bridging the gap between healthcare and design,” Dr. Appel, KITE Affiliate Scientist, explains. “You want the general public to want to engage, and there are certain design principles that are not the expertise of researchers.”
She’s been looking for people who might be open to creating new worlds on caregiVR’s immersive virtual reality system in partnership with the scientists who have developed its parameters. Recently, she worked with a VR game designer to create a game in caregiVR that allows seniors to interact in an art gallery, using virtual tools to work on a painting of their choosing.
Those kinds of connections are what KITE Creates hopes to make happen more often. “We’re really about building bridges between health researchers or early-stage health ventures and creative industry professionals,” says Ng. “That’s going to increase the odds that these unique clinical insights coming out of KITE will be translated into products and services that have commercial success and can help people.”