Transforming Medicine: The Impact of Augmented Reality in Health Care

Augmented reality (AR) integrates a digital overlay with your physical perception of the world. Although it has been around for more than 20 years, this technology can significantly aid health care professionals in treating and diagnosing patients. When it comes to AR and VR (Virtual Reality), AR integrates the display with the physical world, while VR creates a fully immersive digital simulation of the world. 

To do this, AR uses a head-mounted display (HMD), sometimes called a heads-up display (HUD), which is either a headset or glasses with a camera to see, track, and integrate your view with the AR's digital overlay. With advancements in deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI), AR in health care has the potential to be a revolutionary technology for delivering better and more efficient patient care. 

Explore the various uses of AR in health care, including its benefits for surgery, education, diagnostics, and telemedicine. 

Augmented reality in medical training

AR in medical training allows you to train safely and effectively when studying to become a medical professional. Overall, AR usage in education has positive learner outcomes by engaging learners theoretically and practically without the side effects often associated with virtual reality, like dizziness, headaches, and nausea. Three ways that AR in medical training enhances learner outcomes include:

• Knowledge and understanding: AR cadavers allow learners to see many different kinds of diseases and pathologies in one space. It also enables you to uncover blood vessels, muscles, and skeletal structures to see how each anatomical unit works together to produce its function. 

• Practical skills: AR programs can help simulate surgical training, allowing you to build up hands-on skills and techniques for various surgeries. They provide a simulated environment with the stress, precision, and efficiency needed in an actual surgery. 

• Social skills: AR simulation can help build social skills related to stress and situation management in a range of health care settings before entering the workplace. In a simulated surgery, for example, learners can build communication skills with their peers while under similar conditions to reality. 

AR medical training programs

Various training programs and applications related to the medical field allow educators to use AR in medical training. Some examples of these applications include:

• HoloHuman allows you to see and interact with immersive holographic anatomical models with labeled structures of male and female bodies, no matter where you are. 

• HoloPatient allows you to interact with, assess, and diagnose simulated patients in any space. The application currently has 17 diverse patients with different symptoms.

• OculAR SIM, built by Deakin University, this application allows you to interact with the human and its surrounding anatomical structures in any space. 

Enhancing surgical navigation and visualization

In surgery, AR has already been put to use in helping surgeons navigate and visualize multiple displays, especially when it comes to precise operations like spinal surgery. In spinal surgeries, AR aids surgeons in seeing a patient’s internal anatomy based on their previous medical scans, like a CT. You can even overlay a patient’s CT scan in real time without looking at a separate screen and moving your attention away from the patient. In neurosurgery, AR gives surgeons a 3D view of a patient’s skull and brain to visualize the location of tumors and gives surgeons additional tools to make more accurate plans for the actual surgery. 

Improving patient care and treatment

AR has many potential benefits in improving patient care and treatment, from physical therapy rehabilitation to helping patients monitor their progress and prepare for surgical operations. AR assists with physical therapy by projecting walking targets on the floor, guiding the proper movement of weaker limbs, and providing physical therapists with data to give effective feedback. AR overlays of patient conditions can improve communication between the patient and doctor, as well as how the patient communicates their condition to family members and friends. 

Remote assistance and telemedicine

Remote assistance and telemedicine use AR to send live video of a post-operative surgical wound, for example, and have a surgeon or specialized nurse perform a post-operative appointment remotely, live annotating or analyzing to guide the on-site nurse. Other examples of AR in telemedicine include:

• Ultrasound clinicians in rural settings can use AR to get live feedback, images, and annotations on the ultrasound from a consultant or specialist.

• During the height of the pandemic, a senior clinical team member entered the COVID-19 ward with an AR-capable Microsoft HoloLens 2. This allowed other team members to annotate, inset images, and examine patient records remotely, decreasing exposure and saving personal protective equipment. 

• In emergency surgery situations, a surgeon can wear an AR headset that allows remote experts to annotate, bring in images, and give real-time guidance during the surgery, potentially reducing post-operative complications. 

• Telemedicine extends beyond remote assistance to remote education. A surgeon or clinician can wear an AR HMD and stream the video back to students, who can type questions in a chat that are then displayed to the HMD user, creating a live, interactive teaching session. 

Telemedicine and remote assistance allow local technicians, nurses, or doctors to receive help from specialized experts anywhere in the world in real time. 

Ethical considerations of augmented reality in health care

Augmented reality in health care opens the conversation about various ethical and regulatory considerations involving its usage. These include considerations like the usage of patient data in the research and development of these products. Other ethical considerations include:

• Using patient data raises privacy issues and the need for greater cybersecurity measures and patient consent.

• Technological issues in AR could lead to mistakes, errors, or competency issues by the surgeon.

• While technology is a helpful tool, it cannot replace the surgeon as a craftsperson with the skills to perform the surgery, even if the AR device fails. 

• The AR equipment is expensive and requires special technicians, as well as additional training of surgeons and other personnel, potentially raising costs. 

Future directions and opportunities

Future direction and development opportunities need to consider the perspectives of both doctors and patients to ensure that the technology focuses on positive patient outcomes. Future research should focus on larger cohorts of patients to better understand the potential benefits and standardization of equipment to ensure its function.

Learn more about augmented reality in health care and other industries with Coursera

Augmented reality can potentially benefit health care workflows and patient outcomes. To learn more about AR in health care, try the XR in Healthcare Education and Clinical Practice from Imperial College London on Coursera. The program covers extended reality (XR) design for health care education, clinical practice, and more.

Are you looking to learn more about augmented reality? Try the Extended Reality for Everybody Specialization from the University of Michigan. In this Specialization, you'll learn concepts and key applications of XR.