NHS Highland is collaborating with Summit Wearable Solutions, an Inverness-based technology company, to develop healthcare applications for smart glasses.
The glasses are a wearable computer that adds information to what the user can see by projecting an image onto the screen. The smart glasses also have self-contained mobile apps, a high-resolution camera and voice recognition software which turns speech into text.
Alan Whiteside, innovation consultant with NHS Highland’s research, development and innovation department, believes that the glasses could be of particular interest to surgeons and A&E staff.
He said: “It’s early days yet but several clinicians have already indicated that they are very interested in the glasses and have suggested some possible applications.
“The plan is to turn these ideas into reality and take it from there. If things go as we hope, the smart glasses could help to put NHS Highland at the forefront internationally of a technology with vast potential.”
Smart glasses have already been used in surgery and as a teaching aid for medical students, but Whiteside believes NHS Highland can create new medical applications.
Among the NHS Highland clinicians who have been shown the glasses is consultant cardiologist Stephen Leslie, who said he believed the technology was, “very, very interesting with a lot of potential”.
He said: “I think it is very refreshing to have a clinical dialogue right at the beginning of the development stage to see where the needs of the patients are.”
Leslie said that the glasses could also have potential in Raigmore Hospital’s catheterisation laboratory, where diagnostic imaging equipment is used to visualise the arteries of the heart.
The lab has a range of screens which clinicians have to check while a patient is being examined. With the glasses, it would be possible to look at and care for the patient and at the same time view information about heart rate, blood pressure, pulse, etc., according to NHS Highland.
Leslie added that there was also potential for using the glasses to keep a medical, legal record of what was being done to a patient.
Summit Wearable chief executive Chris Bryson said: “in both surgery and cardiology, the surgeon works with the patient, but is looking away, in some cases at a whole wall of monitors. We can take the information on those monitors and certain vital signs and put those in the glasses as display so they can be focusing on the patient.
“In the future we might provide augmented reality where you could overlay imaging information on top of the view of the patient.”
Surgeons in the Highlands started testing the devices in trial surgeries this month.
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