NXP Semiconductors and GE HealthCare established a partnership to lead new developments in edge AI innovation by leveraging GE HealthCare’s deep experience in medical technology innovation and NXP’s long history of secure, high-performance edge processing.
The partnership, which started with new anesthesia and neonatal concepts presented at CES 2026, demonstrates how edge AI’s intelligence, low latency, resilience, and security can revolutionize specific workflows and enable clinicians to provide better patient care with straightforward, useful insights.
Care teams need technologies that give actionable intelligence with minimal delay in acute care environments such as the operating room and neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
On-device edge AI analyzes data to provide fast, reliable performance and facilitate the prompt availability of crucial insights. Clinicians may have fast, reliable, secure access to critical inforamtion if edge AI is integrated into point-of-care devices.
Together, GE HealthCare and NXP have developed two new concepts that combine GE HealthCare’s experience with medical technology advances with NXP’s edge AI capabilities and portfolio.
In order to give anesthesiologists a reliable, hands-free method of interacting with anesthetic equipment through real-time voice commands, the initial concept applies edge AI capabilities to anesthesia delivery in the operating room.
The goal of this research is to lessen excessive cognitive load, alarm fatigue, and human mistake while assisting anesthesiologists in caring for patients in a busy, dynamic operating room.
The second concept is designed to support neonatal care through intelligent, live monitoring. This technology aims to detect whether an infant is crying or at rest, identify unwanted objects in the bed, or recognize if the baby has rolled onto their stomach — designed to help care teams and enable them to keep babies comfortable.
This concept uses agentic AI on the edge to log the event and alert clinicians, if appropriate. All image processing occurs locally using models leveraging the NXP eIQ AI Toolkit. No images leave the device, supporting strict security and privacy standards.
The development of both concepts is underpinned by GE HealthCare’s Responsible AI principles, which include a focus on safety, security, privacy, validity, transparency, explainability, and fairness.
The concepts are based on NXP’s applications processors with integrated neural processing units (NPUs), as well as a dedicated, standalone NPU, with software enablement from NXP’s eIQ AI Toolkit.
Key Comments
“At GE HealthCare, we build AI that keeps clinicians at the center, assisting clinical judgment and freeing up time for patient care,” said Jeff Caron, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Patient Care Solutions, GE HealthCare. “Collaborating with NXP helps us explore secure on-device AI as a complement to our cloud solutions, with concepts designed to support care teams in acute settings.”
“This collaboration brings together GE HealthCare’s clinical trust and decades of medical technology innovation with NXP’s eIQ AI enablement and deep experience in secure, high-performance edge computing to provide safe, secure, and practical edge AI solutions to clinicians and patients,” said Charles Dachs, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Secure Connected Edge, NXP. “Together, we aim to enable more personalized care, from continuous monitoring in the NICU and hands-free interaction with anesthesia equipment to exploratory research concepts such as AI-driven risk prediction, automated triage, and personalized treatment recommendations.”
