Clinical and surgical applications of smart glasses

Abstract

Background: With the increased efforts to adopt health information technology in the healthcare field, many innovative devices have emerged to improve patient care, increase efficiency, and decrease healthcare costs. A recent addition is smart glasses: web-connected glasses that can present data onto the lenses and record images or videos through a front-facing camera.

Objective: In this article, we review the most salient uses of smart glasses in healthcare, while also denoting their limitations including practical capabilities and patient confidentiality.

Methods: Using keywords including, but not limited to, ``smart glasses'', ``healthcare'', ``evaluation'', ``privacy'', and ``development'', we conducted a search on Ovid-MEDLINE, PubMed, and Google Scholar. A total of 71 studies were included in this review.

Results: Smart glasses have been adopted into the healthcare setting with several useful applications including, hands-free photo and video documentation, telemedicine, Electronic Health Record retrieval and input, rapid diagnostic test analysis, education, and live broadcasting.

Conclusions: In order for the device to gain acceptance by medical professionals, smart glasses will need to be tailored to fit the needs of medical and surgical sub-specialties. Future studies will need to qualitatively assess the benefits of smart glasses as an adjunct to the current health information technology infrastructure.

Keywords: Electronic Health Records; Meta-Pro spaceglasses; Smart glasses; augmented reality; epson moverio; google glass; heads-up-display; telemedicine.