Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Nov 8, 2022
Date Accepted: Jan 31, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Smart Glasses for Supporting Distributed Care Work: A Systematic Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Over the past two decades, various desktop and mobile telemedicine systems have been developed to support communication and care coordination between distributed medical teams. However, in the hands-busy care environment, such technologies could become cumbersome as they require medical professionals to manually operate. Smart glasses have been gaining momentum because of their advantages in enabling hands-free operation and see-what-I-see video-based consultation. Previous research has tested this novel technology in different health care settings.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to review how smart glasses were designed, used, and evaluated as a telemedicine tool to support distributed care coordination and communication, and highlight the potential benefits and limitations of medical professionals' use of smart glasses in practice.
Methods:
We conducted a literature search in six databases that cover research within both healthcare and computer science domains. We used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology to review articles. A total of 5,865 articles were retrieved and screened by three researchers, with 21 articles included for in-depth analysis.
Results:
Most of the reviewed articles used off-the-shelf hardware and videoconferencing software. The common system features used and evaluated in those studies included video and audio streaming, annotation, augmented reality (AR), and hands-free interactions. These studies focused on evaluating the technical feasibility, effectiveness, and user experience of smart glasses. Even though the smart glass technology has demonstrated numerous benefits and high levels of user acceptance, the reviewed studies noted a variety of barriers to successful adoption of this novel technology in actual care settings, including technical limitations, human factors, privacy and security issues, and organizational challenges.
Conclusions:
User-centered system design, improved hardware performance and software reliability are needed to realize the potential of smart glasses. More research is needed to examine and evaluate medical professionals’ needs, preferences and perceptions, and elucidate how smart glasses affect the clinical workflow in complex care environments. Our findings inform the design, implementation and evaluation of smart glasses that will improve organizational and patient outcomes.
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