HeyGears Helps Digitalize Dental Treatment on AWS

HeyGears, founded in 2015, operates in over 30 countries and regions, including the US, Europe, China, and Southeast Asia. It provides digital manufacturing solutions across various industries such as dentistry, consumer electronics, orthopedics/rehabilitation, and manufacturing. Through 3D printing, software development, materials R&D, and big-data handling, HeyGears wants to create fully integrated digital solutions with hardware, software, materials, and service platforms to enhance daily lives.

A key industry HeyGears is focused on is dentistry. By providing 3D printing applications and complete digital oral solutions, HeyGears is revolutionizing the dental industry by helping to deliver a better patient experience with standardized high-quality treatment. The traditional method of plaster impression, manual application design and production is not only inefficient, but also sometimes suffers from inaccurate data, or is unable to meet patients’ expectations.

3D printing, in contrast, provides greater convenience for dental labs, clinics, and patients. With technical expertise and maturity in 3D printing, HeyGears launched its UltraCraft C Series 3D printers on Feb 2022, which allow dental practices to quickly produce high-precision products. The printers are suitable for use in fixed and removable restoration, implants, and orthodontics.

HeyGears view its UltraCraft 3D printers as more than just hardware. They form part of the company’s digital ecosystem vision, which is to efficiently process dental data and automate complex treatment design needs intelligently. To that end, HeyGears launched HeyGears Cloud, a SaaS platform for integrated production solutions, to provide dental clinics with one-stop digital services, from data transmission and design services to printing management. HeyGears Cloud not only strips out unnecessary processes, it also shows real-time production statuses making it easy for chairside clinicians or lab technicians to run jobs efficiently.

To build HeyGears Cloud, the company had to overcome several barriers. Gui Peiyan, CEO, HeyGears, explains, “We serve markets such as Europe and the United States, where strict legal restrictions are imposed on the storage and use of medical data. We need to build our services for local customers, which requires support from a cloud platform with global service capabilities.” 

Chen Daoyi, technology director at HeyGears, adds, “An AI-driven model design and recommended parameters provided by HeyGears Cloud requires algorithm design as well as greater computing power. We need to partner with a cloud service provider to deploy our business on the cloud.”

HeyGears also needed to have stable and reliable cloud services, compliance and data security, and a low-latency network. After comprehensive evaluation, HeyGears decided to build HeyGears Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“Data sovereignty requirements are becoming increasingly complicated across the world. The AWS Global Infrastructure allows us to store relevant data in local regions, and let local clinics access our services with lower latency," Gui says. “To comply with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), AWS provides more than 130 services and related guidelines to help us improve platform security and compliance, which particularly facilitates our presence in North America.”

HeyGears Cloud also needed powerful compute resources to efficiently process data and automate design for its customers. By using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, including GPU, it can quickly complete the design of dentistry models and generate drilling process guidance, based on AI recommendations. Combining Amazon EC2 with Amazon FSx for Lustre's fully managed shared storage service helped reduce costs and increase efficiency for model training in graphics-intensive applications and machine learning.

From the design and manufacturing of 3D printing devices to the innovation of HeyGears Cloud SaaS, HeyGears needed mature services to quickly build platforms and be future ready. AWS’s diversified services helped address HeyGears’ needs. "In North America, for example, the labs and clinics we serve are distributed across different states and cities. The quality of the “last mile network” directly affects the experience of dental clinics when using online services. The Amazon Global Accelerator service improved traffic performance between clinic users and the HeyGears Cloud platform, which not only solved for packet loss, jitter, and latency, but also refined the customer experience." Chen says. 

“Many AWS services, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), support deployment in multiple availability zones, which enhances the competency of HeyGears Cloud and improves the SLA of our external services. The stability and reliability of HeyGears Cloud platform and ChairSide devices directly affects our clinical business. We solved this by integrating AWS services."

Wangsu Science and Technology Co., Ltd. (Wangsu), an AWS Partner Network partner, also provided HeyGears with solutions and technical support. Wangsu’s HandyOps, a cloud-based finance management module, enables continuous monitoring and automatic analysis of Amazon EC2 instance utilization and cost, and suggests cost reduction for reserved instance purchase and configuration, helping HeyGears to improve instance utilization and lower computing cost. 

Wangsu’s Managed Service Provider (MSP) technical team uses the storage optimization solution that combines Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) intelligent layering with CDN distribution, helping HeyGears save on storage cost, accelerate the distribution of model drawings, and enhance operation efficiency and user experience. By adopting Wangsu’s Big E-connect product solution, HeyGears meets its business need to access cross-border data, and connect data both on and off the cloud. Thanks to Wangsu, HeyGears is taking the “fast lane” for efficient operation, innovation and development.

With HeyGears Cloud, HeyGears provides industry customers with a full value chain in 3D printing, accelerating the digital development of dentistry. 

In addition, HeyGears has realized safe and compliant operations worldwide. “HeyGears Cloud is a key business application. With the compliance verification provided by AWS, we directly know how privacy and data are protected. We also introduce data masking before data transmission to prevent data leakage," Gui said. "Our technical team has adopted a series of cloud security services, including Amazon WAF - Web Application Firewall, to enhance the defense of HeyGears Cloud against Internet threats and attacks and ensure a more secure and reliable platform."

By using HeyGears ChairSide 3D printers connected to HeyGears Cloud, dentists only need to upload oral scanning data models, place design orders, and confirm printing. The rest of the work is completed automatically through a machine learning algorithm. Doctors’ assistants can then print the oral guide with one click, and complete the implant operation efficiently and safely using standardized process. For some cases, the entire chairside diagnosis and treatment process can be completed within 2 hours, boosting dental clinics’ efficiency, and improving patients’ experience and satisfaction.

By working with services from AWS and Wangsu, HeyGears has reduced cost and eased pressure on its operations. "Wangsu has given us a lot of recommendations about architecture optimization," Chen says. "We are considering running code more efficiently through Amazon Lambda serverless services for some business scenarios, so that our technical team can focus on innovation instead of operation and maintenance.” 

Going forward, HeyGears will expand its use of AWS. Besides dentistry, rehabilitation orthopedics, and hearables, it will also apply cloud services and 3D printing to more vertical industries including customized automobile refitting. In doing so, it expects to power the digital transformation of the industries through cloud and technological innovation, and make people’s life more efficient and enjoyable with digital technology.

 To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com.manufacturing.