Why Thermal Over Optical Cameras

There's plenty of hype around AI and robots in healthcare, but the problem that's actually costing hospitals money right now is operating room coordination. Two to four hours of OR time is lost every single day, not because of the surgeries themselves, but because of everything in between from manual scheduling and coordination chaos to guesswork about room turnover.  

Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, we're bringing you a conversation that TechCrunch AI Editor Russell Brandom had with Conor McGinn, co-founder and CEO of Akara, the startup that recently landed a spot on Time's Best Inventions of 2025 and is building what’s essentially air traffic control for hospitals using thermal sensors and AI.   

Listen to the full episode to hear: 

• Why Akara pivoted from cleaning robots to ambient sensing, and how thermal sensors document surgeries without privacy concerns 

• How NHS vetting became McGinn's backdoor into US hospitals 

• The real bottleneck holding back medical robotics. (Spoiler: it's not the robots, it's the infrastructure) 

• Why 40% of the nursing workforce could leave in the next five years, and what that means for automation 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

Chapters: 

00:00 - Introduction  

00:54 - Air traffic control for ORs  

02:35 - Where hospitals lose hours daily  

03:54 - Selling into risk-averse hospitals  

06:21 - Thermal sensors and edge AI 

09:11 - NHS as proof of concept  

13:16 - The AI under the hood  

18:12 - Privacy benefits of thermal  

21:22 - Infrastructure before robots 

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