*Top picture credit: Delly Carr, Swimming Australia
Behind these moments are passionate innovators who dare to think differently, supported by technology that helps turn their boldest ideas into reality.
Delivering a breakthrough is about empowering the dreamers, problem-solvers, and pioneers who are working to make our world better. Here's how four pioneering organizations achieved their lightbulb moments and turned them into reality with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Making Waves with AI to Transform Athletic Performance
In competitive swimming, where milliseconds separate gold from silver, coaches have traditionally relied on their eyes alone - standing poolside at international competitions, squinting through splashes and refracted light, trying to capture those split-second moments that could make all the difference.
As Swimming Australia's general manager of Performance Support and Olympic Campaigns, Jess Corones sees this challenge as an opportunity for innovation, transforming the organization's approach to training through data-driven technology and leading the team to their most successful Olympic performances in Tokyo and Paris.
“In training pools, you have multiple swimmers sharing lanes, different strokes, drills, and coaches yelling stroke rates from the sidelines. It's far more complex than tracking a single swimmer during a race,” said Corones.
Undeterred, Swimming Australia worked with AWS in a proof-of-concept project to install advanced computer vision and machine learning (ML) technology at one of its training pools, with the goal of cutting through the splashes and refracted light from water and precisely tracking each individual swimmer.
The result is Sparta, a race analysis system that's transforming how athletes train and compete by tracking swimmers through the chaos of churning water, measuring everything from stroke rates to breathing patterns with precision. Coaches use these insights to fine-tune performance and give them a competitive edge. Powered by AWS, Sparta has already had a significant impact, helping coaches and athletes ahead of a record medal haul at Tokyo and medal tally success at Paris Olympics.
Swimming Australia is now planning to roll Sparta out to training pools across Australia, making it one of the first countries in the world to install this capability in a training environment. The team is also investing to improve the speed of race analysis, to give coaches immediate access to metrics as soon as a race finishes.
“Our goal is for our training pools to be the equivalent of a “Formula 1 garage” where our swimmers can go to fine-tune every part of their performance using real-time data analytics and insights, before they had out for a race,” said Corones.
Illuminating the Path with Self-Driving Technology for the Visually Impaired
Growing up as the only member of his family without a disability, Cornel Amariei witnessed firsthand the transformative power of technology – and its absence in the lives of those who needed it most. This personal experience would later fuel his mission to revolutionize mobility for the visually impaired through .lumen, a startup that builds glasses that empower the blind to live a better life using self-driving technology.
With only 28,000 guide dogs currently working worldwide and the number of visually impaired individuals expected to surpass 500 million by 2050, Amariei saw an opportunity where others saw obstacles – a chance to successfully replicate the capabilities of a guide dog in AI-powered glasses.
The company's Glasses for the Blind, tested across 20 countries and three continents, proved that AI could reliably guide visually impaired individuals through complex urban environments.
“The glasses are designed to replicate the features of a guide dog. If a guide dog pulls your hand to lead you in the right direction to keep you safe, the glasses will gently pull your head,” said Amariei.
The journey from concept to reality got its first major boost when .lumen joined AWS Activate in 2021. The program provided .lumen with vital cloud credits and technical resources required to help Amariei's team develop their AI-powered glasses.
“AWS Activate gave us the foundation we needed at a critical time, which enabled our team to pour our energy into innovation. That early support transformed .lumen from an ambitious idea into a real solution that could help visually impaired people worldwide.”
.lumen is now preparing to roll out their revolutionary AI-powered glasses across Romania and other European markets in the first quarter of 2025. Collaborating with the AWS Prototyping and Cloud Engineering team, .lumen built a fleet management system, underpinned by AWS Internet of Things (IoT) technology to help deliver on the company’s global expansion plans.
“Every pair of .lumen glasses is more than just a device – it's a lifeline that needs to work flawlessly,” explains Amariei. “Leveraging AWS IoT enables us to monitor, update, and optimize each device remotely to ensure our users always have access to the latest improvements in our AI navigation systems.”
For Amariei, this launch represents more than just business expansion – it's a step toward fulfilling his vision of a world where visual impairment no longer limits independence, transforming the lives of millions one pair of glasses at a time.
In the future, .lumen aims to reuse the underlying software technology of Glasses for the Blind, named Pedestrian Autonomous Driving (or PAD AI), to perform delivery services with humanoid robotics in the pedestrian world.
Painting a New Future: AI Technology Makes Art More Accessible
For Chloe Ryan, founder of Acrylic Robotics, the intersection of art and technology isn't just a business opportunity – it's a mission to democratize art while protecting artists' legacies. Growing up surrounded by art, she witnessed both the beauty of creative expression and the barriers many artists face in bringing their visions to life.
“Every artist deserves the chance to share their work with the world, regardless of physical limitations,” says Ryan. This belief drove her to create a groundbreaking solution that combines generative AI with advanced robotics, powered by AWS.
“With AWS, we can work with artists to analyze any image or digital file and recreate it with actual paint on canvas, maintaining their unique style while ensuring authenticity,” explains Ryan.
Acrylic Robotics recently collaborated with AI-collaborative artist, Claire Silver to recreate her digital masterpiece, "transplant", as a physical painting. Their technology reproduced Silver’s artwork with stunning accuracy guided by sophisticated AI trained on millions of data points per piece using Amazon SageMaker.
“Our paintings have thousands of strokes each — many more than are visible to the naked eye, but which contribute to the depth and dimensionality of the final result,” said Ryan.
Silver, who has a chronic illness that for years had her bedridden, is a strong believer that accessibility breeds innovation and companies like Acrylic Robotics are allowing people to express their creativity in new ways.
"With the rise of AI, for the first time, the barrier of skill is swept away and in this evolving era, taste is the new skill,” said Silver.
At AWS re:Invent 2024, Silver is working again with Acrylic Robotics to showcase what a second digital artwork, "r=asinn0” (which represents the polar equation for a rose curve represented as a sine wave in precalculus), would look like on a physical canvas.
With hundreds of artists already signed up, Acrylic Robotics is transforming how art is created, shared, and protected – one brushstroke at a time.
Harnessing AI to Develop New Solutions in Healthcare
Today physicians spend a significant amount of time getting up to speed on a patient’s history and care status. This is especially challenging for oncologists because the treatment journey for cancer patients can last years and involves numerous doctor visits, tests, and treatments across several care settings.
GE HealthCare is developing a new cloud-first application harnessing AI to give clinicians an easy way to see the patient journey in a single view with CareIntellect for Oncology. This innovation, built incorporating AWS HealthLake, brings together data from medical images, medical records, notes, and device readings and organizes it in one place, using generative AI to summarize clinical notes and reports—potentially saving a doctor hours that can better be spent with patients.
For Abu Mirza, global senior vice president of Digital Products and Engineering at GE HealthCare, this breakthrough represents a perfect fusion of healthcare and AI.
"In healthcare, every advancement has the potential to change someone's story. That's what drives me every day – knowing that we can harness the power of technology to make lives better for care teams and patients.”
CareIntellect for Oncology organizes disparate data sources, summarizes complex medical histories, supports treatment response assessments, helps assess clinical trial eligibility, and tracks adherence to treatment protocols in an easy-to-navigate view. The application is also able to flag risk of deviation from the treatment plan, helping the clinician determine potential next steps to intervene—for example, surfacing a patient’s missed lab work that could delay the next round of treatment.
"These are exactly the type of new technologies we set out to develop as we have leaned further into generative AI—solutions that can help us provide better care, delivered in a better way,” explains Mirza. "By using AWS, we're able to develop AI-enabled solutions that are helping us free up doctors’ time to do what they do best—treat patients, rather than getting bogged down in administrative and inefficient tasks.”
But GE HealthCare isn't stopping there. The company has announced the industry’s first full-body 3D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) research foundation model.[1] This research project was built on AWS, using services such as Amazon SageMaker, to enable developers to build applications for tasks such as image retrieval, classification, operational efficiency, and report generation.
GE HealthCare developed this technology by training the first-generation of the model on a dataset of more than 173,000 MRI images from more than 19,000 studies, using only MRI images. It is the latest innovation as part of GE HealthCare’s AI Innovation Lab, an initiative designed to accelerate early-concept AI innovations within the company.
“GE HealthCare has been a pioneer in the development of foundation models in healthcare. This is a great example of us exploring what’s next,” said Mirza.
[1] Concept only. This work is in concept phase and may never become a product. Not for Sale. Any reported results are preliminary and subject to change. Not cleared or approved by the U.S. FDA or any other global regulator for commercial availability.
Also read, How Amazon is supporting STEM education in Australia
