2. If you could have one superpower, what would it be? If you’re a fisherman,
would it be X-Ray vision to see what lies beneath the water’s surface? If you are
a doctor, would it be to know the exact right treatment for your cancer patient?
And what if you could grant superpowers? What powers might you grant your
employees, suppliers, or customers?
Elevating performance and capability with
Connected Human Systems
We’ve recruited teams of experts that leverage enhanced sensing, visualization,
insights, and action. We deploy those teams to craft solutions with the sole aspiration
of driving value into your organization. Connected Human Systems is a category
of solutions designed to elevate human capabilities, provide deeper senses, deploy
agentive applications, and produce smarter tools. Your organization will create
experiences that your customers desire, strengthen the connection with your brand,
drive growth for your organization, and drive out costs. Risk and cost of ownership is
quite low, and the transformational value they create is unprecedented.
For Cantina, our ability to grant such power was 14 years in the making. Each new project
connected to the next, establishing a pattern of bettering lives by deploying powers that:
• Enable parents to know if their child strayed too far from life-saving medicines
• Help Navy pilots become experts at flying tomorrow’s aircraft today
• Turn everyday people into financial wizards to own their financial futures
3. Table of contents
9
4
What exactly is a connected
human system?
Improving cancer treatment
with big data
11
6
What if boaters could see
through the water?
Giving the power to be mindful
10
5
Virtual Reality-based connected
device perfects medical diagnostics
Real-time air quality monitoring
12
7
Award-winning, Oprah-approved
smart connected dog collar
Connected to your financial future
13
8
Helping Hollywood get back to work
during COVID-19
When hearing is better than seeing
4. Cantina.co | 4
A Connected Human System (CHS) is a set of digital tools
that help us perceive, make sense of, and act on the physical
world. You can think of CHS as technological superpowers:
• they expand our ability to gather data about the world
around us
• they improve our ability to extract insight and meaning
for that data
• they extend our ability to reach back out to affect change
CHS lives at the overlap of three modern technologies: the
Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and Mixed Reality. The
combination of these technologies makes it possible to have
a broad range of capabilities and can be applied to a vast
array of challenges and needs.
A CHS is more than just a tool to handle a task. They can be
deployed to entertain us, to help us live safer and healthier
lives, and to enable us to deepen our understanding of the
universe from the smallest particles to the broadest expanses.
What exactly is a Connected Human System?
CHS lives at the
overlap of three modern
technologies: the Internet
of Things, Machine
Learning, and Mixed Reality.
5. When a concussion occurs, the connections between the brain and eyes
are impaired. The current diagnostic method is a medical professional
asking a patient to follow a finger to identify small eye movement
inaccuracies. Consequently, the decision whether or not an athlete can
go back on the field is subjective. SyncThink provides objective data to
help medical professionals make better treatment decisions.
Given concussions remain one of the most underreported and
underdiagnosed types of brain trauma, a more reliable solution was
needed. When using EYE-SYNC, a football player fresh from a collision
or a soldier who’s taken a blow during training puts on the VR headset
and follows a red dot moving in a circle. In under 60 seconds, a
generated report is transmitted to a companion digital tablet, helping
the onsite medical professional determine if the patient is safe to return
to the game or training. The system reduces the risk of brain damage in
critical post-injury moments.
Now adopted by the NCAA’s PAC-12 Conference, EYE-SYNC is a
core part of its concussion identification, evaluation, and management
protocol across all sports and teams. The latest version of the system
considers vestibular balance dysfunction, combining the latest
innovations in Sports Concussion Assessment with cloud-connected,
HIPAA-compliant analytics.
Virtual Reality-based connected device
perfects medical diagnostics
Cantina.co | 5
SyncThink’s EYE-SYNC is an
FDA-approved portable brain
injury detection system using VR
technology, digital eye-tracking,
and connected devices.
6. What if boaters could see through the water?
Boaters have a GPS map on their phone, a fish-finder with side-
scanning, changing weather, winds, currents, tides, 100 bait options,
bugs, kids, …It takes a lot of expertise and attention to combine a 2D
map view, sonar data view, and your position on the water to get to the
best fishing spots.
For decades, military R&D teams have been developing state-of-the-art
HUD (Heads-Up Display) systems for jet pilots – each device costing
millions of dollars. Now that tech can be in the hands of every boaters’
hands. CleAR partnered with Cantina to develop a system that will
capture and project onto phones and AR glasses the most detailed 3D
terrain maps and anchor them to over 28,000 North American lakes,
rivers, and coastlines.
Built for the device in your pocket, the ClearWater app gives boaters
a 360º view of the terrain around them, visible up to 300 yards.
ClearWater lets boaters mark their favorite fishing spots and find new
ones for when they return. By identifying shallow areas shown on the
water as hazard zones with depth-specific buoys, the system improves
the mental and physical safety of boaters charting unfamiliar waters.
In addition to the phone app, a premium application is being created for
running on the nReal Glasses, designed to free the hands of boaters so
they can focus on driving the boat and casting their lines. Simple hand
gestures mark favorite fishing spots.
6 | Cantina.co
7. Award-winning, Oprah-approved smart
connected dog collar
• Alerting you if your dog leaves designated safe zones
• Locating your dog with fast and accurate GPS tracking
• Receiving customized activity goals and monitor
your dog’s daily activity
• Managing your dog’s safety with ambient
temperature alerts and a remote turn on LED light
• Organizing vet and vaccination records in our app
and set important reminders
The work represents a serious Connected Human
System. The complex interconnected relationship
of radios working in tandem to establish a valuable
IoT-based application. It worked so well, CES judges
took notice with its CES Innovation Award, and it also
became one of Oprah’s Favorite Things in 2019.
Anyone who owns a dog knows the strength of a bond that is formed,
and the stress that is created when seperated. The American Kennel
Club reached out to Cantina to create a digital connection with our pets.
Link AKC and Cantina worked to bring to market a connected product
and mobile experience that emphasizes connection and the security,
health, and emotional wellbeing of a dog and its owner. Introducing
features such as:
Cantina.co | 7
8. Helping Hollywood get back to work
during COVID-19
In the spring of 2020, as the threat of a COVID-19 pandemic moved
governments to introduce measures to keep people safe, TV and film
production studios shut their doors. In June 2020, the Alliance of
Motion Picture and Television Producers established an industry-wide
task force that created a set of recommendations focused on the safe
resumption of productions.
The recommendations included regular cast and crew health screening,
diagnostic testing, personal protective equipment use, cleaning and
disinfecting, and steps to be taken if or when a cast or crew member
contracts COVID-19. One problem was the absence of an easy-to-
implement system that studios could use to roll out and manage the
protocols. Wayne Morris, an award-winning film producer, partnered
with Cantina to create a system that would address these critical needs.
In less than ten weeks, the team designed, built, and launched a
flexible and scalable workforce safety system. The system can be
used at any production location, and includes daily health screenings,
contactless food ordering and pick-up, virtual meetings, COVID-19
safety notifications, and access to critical documents, including call
sheets, site maps, zone assignments, and script sides, all focused on
keeping cast and crew safe and productive. The system includes a robust
and securitized administrative interface for directors and production
managers to communicate with cast and crew and help ensure that all
personnel are adhering to the necessary safety guidelines.
8 | Cantina.co
9. Improving cancer treatment with big data
Cantina partnered with a pioneer in health analytics and precision
medicine to improve quality of life and achieve better survival rates in
cancer patients.
Effective cancer treatment can come by tailoring therapy to individual
patients and their needs and using the right therapy at the right time
with the right treatment protocol. This requires data and insight.
Cantina designed and built a big data analytics system that aggregates
cancer patient treatment data and visually compares individual
treatment progress and outcomes with similar patient cohorts. Insights
from this effort help oncologists and other health care professionals
monitor and fine-tune treatment for individual patients, leading to
improved quality of life and better overall outcomes and survival rates.
Cantina is a trusted technical advisor and software engineering partner
to this client, helping it to design and build a valuable connected system
for its physician, hospital, and cancer treatment center customers.
The system is actively used by leading hospitals and cancer treatment
centers across the U.S.
Cantina.co | 9
10. Real-time air quality monitoring
What if you could build a system where air quality sensors were
so relatively small and cheap, they could be placed anywhere and
everywhere? You could blanket the earth with multiple points of
measurement to better understand the hyper-local conditions of the
world around you. That’s exactly what Elm, PerkinElmer’s innovative
air monitoring system, was designed to do -- provide local air quality
analysis for individuals, smart cities, and sustainable communities.
The Elm network contains devices with multiple air monitoring sensors.
The units, placed outdoors where individuals can benefit from real-
time air quality information, such as in industrial areas, neighborhoods,
parks, and schools. The sensors measure patterns of seven air quality
indicators, including ozone, particulates (soil or dust materials), and
nitrogen dioxide. Each device connects to the secure Elm data network
to send readings from the sensors every 20 seconds, enabling customers
to view up-to-the-minute air quality conditions.
To meet customer needs, Cantina designed an easy-to-use, highly visual
system to provide a single dashboard view of relevant sensor data. We
built a system architecture capable of dealing with large amounts of
disparate data from the sensor network and quickly incorporating it into
the system.
10 | Cantina.co
Sensors measure patterns of seven
air quality indicators.
11. Giving the power to be mindful
Remember when your mom had to safety pin your mittens to your coat
sleeves so you would have them to keep your hands warm and they
would make it back home from school? That gives you an idea of the
system Cantina prototyped for Dana Farber, except the mittens, in this
case, were life-saving medicines in autoinjectors such as EpiPens, and
the safety pins were radio signals.
Ichnaea is a connected wearable system that functions as an EpiPen
tracking system. The wearable addresses a common problem for
youth at risk for anaphylactic shock due to pre-existing allergies:
it immediately alerts children and their parents to the presence or
absence of a nearby EpiPen.
The exploratory prototype consisted of two 3D-printed hardware
devices (one wearable that resembles a smartwatch and one tracker
that could be attached to EpiPen devices), connected to an iOS
application via BLE.
Cantina 3D printed the hardware, designed and built the app, and then
integrated all system components. For this first iteration, the hardware
devices alerted users to distance variations or out-of-range devices by
visual (LED light) indicators only.
Cantina.co | 11
Ichnaea is a connected wearable
system that functions as an
EpiPen tracking system.
12. Making financial wizards of investors
Getting people to think about saving for retirement is a significant
challenge. Motivating them to actively engage in their retirement saving
plan? That’s a whole different ball game.
Empower Retirement provides services to companies of every size
with more than 8 million participants using its platform. The company’s
mission is found in its name: empowering people to take their financial
destinies into their own hands, or in this case, onto their wrists.
Cantina was tasked with establishing a 401(K) system to follow their
progress toward their retirement goals, modify contribution rates and
allocations, and update their beneficiaries. Having it tied to their wrist
keeps savings behavior top of mind.
Cantina identified four aspects of the Apple Watch app that fit the
mission to keep people actively involved in their retirement accounts:
• Display progress toward achieving retirement income goals
• Show current balances and the value of investments
• Provide simple notifications people can respond to from the Apple
Watch
• Make retirement planning playful by displaying a countdown
clock to project days remaining until retirement
12 | Cantina.co
Many people saving for retirement are not
actively involved in investing their own
money, and even more, are people who
check their accounts only a few times
a year. The Empower Apple Watch app
changes that model by providing a holistic
user experience from the beginning of
saving for retirement until the day the
clock hits zero. Now 8 million people can
stay involved.
13. When hearing is better than seeing
“Be present” is a key theme of the annual Newport Folk Festival, and for
fans of live music in general. In the modern world, that can be a difficult
task. We’ve all seen it. People walking, heads down, reading, watching,
and typing on screens. Missing the world around them.
The festival leadership, Bose, and Cantina were determined to ensure
fans would keep their heads up, soaking in the entire 60th anniversary
of the 3-day event. Combining connected audio-enhanced sunglasses,
mobile phones, and an extensive content program, we created an audio
augmented reality system designed to keep people tapping their feet
and not their keyboards.
This connected human system would alert fans to key events and
information, while giving them special access to programming that
otherwise couldn’t be delivered. In short, we would keep fans focused
on the scene around them.
The experience was possible after inventing simple gesture controls
to activate the content program through the Bose Frames broadcast
from the mobile festival app. Cantina also established beacons and GPS
markers to trigger a livestream from the hottest, and smallest, stage,
where many concert goers would have otherwise missed out on some
great live music. Bose, Cantina, and the Festival kept people present and
their phones in their pockets.
Cantina.co | 13
Bose, Cantina, and the Newport
Folk Festival kept people present
and their phones in their pockets.
+
14. Cantina’s Connected Human Systems Practice
We’ve developed a proven approach to help business
leaders make better decisions and accelerate innovation.
Innovation isn’t magic, but the result
of disciplined, smart craft
Select clients:
To learn more, visit www.cantina.co
100 Summer Street, Boston, MA 02110-1238
hello@cantina.co | 1-800-775-2714
