The phenomenal success of Pokemon Go showed the world the limitless possibilities of Augmented Reality in the field of entertainment and gaming. However not many are aware of the possibilities Augmented Reality opens up in the field of medicine and healthcare.
Today, we take a look at the ways in which AR can influence the realm of healthcare.
This application of AR vastly expands the range and expertise of the physician working on a complex procedure. Suppose if a given operation requires deeply expert ands of a specialist but he/ she is not available on the hospital premises (or may be present in an altogether different geography), AR can come in handy.
With AR, a medical professional can become actively involved in an on-going procedure. This is achieved by virtually superimposing his/ her hand using Google Glasses for showing the right way to do a detailed task during the operation.
Most of the legally blind people have a little bit of vision left in them. However this is not sufficient to do daily tasks like recognizing faces or reading or evading obstacles in their path. The startup VA-ST helps them to recreate some sense of vision using Augmented Reality. This will create a rough outline of a face (somewhat like a stenciled sketch). This will enhance the level of vision available to the user in poorly lit areas and those with lower level of visibility can figure out an object or a person in front him or her, to a better degree.
Nurses often find it difficult to find a vein on the patient’s vein to draw blood or inject drugs. While many can do so precisely, there are other who need 2-3 attempts before they are able to locate a vein. Accuvein is integrating Augmented Reality into its handheld scanner that makes this task quicker and more efficient. Using this scanner, nurses can easily locate the patient’s vein. The device has been tested on almost 10 million patients and the outcome has been exceptional. The device has proved to be 3.5x more likely to locate a patient’s vein on the first go itself.
Patients can get step by step dosage, mode of action, and its benefits simply by scanning across a bottle of the medicine. Users have the option to scan both the packaging as well as the printed text stuck on the bottle to uncover richer information about a particular drug’s benefit and probable side effects.
None of the fields within healthcare has seen the phenomenal benefits of AR as it is with the medicinal education field. Examples will be ARnatomy that uses OCR in its app to match a specific word like cranium and flash important details with visuals and information.
These are the different ways in which AR can interact with healthcare IT and create an immersive 3d world for precision based medical science education and procedures carried out by medical professionals.
