Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 27, 2023
Date Accepted: Oct 16, 2024
A Smart Glass Telemedicine Application for Prehospital Communication: User-Centered Design
ABSTRACT
Background:
Smart glasses have emerged as a promising solution for enhancing communication and care coordination among distributed medical teams. Although prior research has explored the feasibility of using smart glasses to improve prehospital communication between emergency medical services (EMS) providers and remote physicians, a research gap exists in understanding the specific requirements of EMS providers for smart glass implementation.
Objective:
This study seeks to iteratively design and evaluate a smart glass application tailored for prehospital communication by actively involving prospective users in the system design process.
Methods:
Grounded in participatory design, the study consists of two phases of design requirement gathering, rapid prototyping, usability testing, and prototype refinement. A total of 43 distinct EMS providers with varying characteristics participated in this two-year-long iterative design and evaluation process.
Results:
Our research identifies challenges in two vital prehospital communication activities: contacting online medical control (OLMC) physicians for medical guidance and notifying receiving hospital teams of incoming patients. The iterative design process led to the identification of five pivotal features addressing these challenges: video call functionality with OLMC physicians, call priority indication for expeditious OLMC contact, direct communication with receiving hospitals, multimedia patient information sharing, and touchless interaction methods for operating the smart glasses. Our system design received high user ratings and was perceived to have great potential to improve communication and care coordination efficiency between distributed emergency care teams. Despite so, concerns arose regarding technical aspects, environmental constraints, and potential barriers to workflow integration.
Conclusions:
Through a participatory design approach, this study generates insights into designing user-friendly smart glasses that address the current challenges EMS providers face in the dynamic prehospital contexts. Based on these findings, we discuss future research directions pertinent to the design, implementation, and integration of smart glasses into prehospital care.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.