For many gadget enthusiasts who are in healthcare, Google Glass is and will eventually make its appearance in the care setting and possibly at the point of care. Since a number of early limited number of the devices have been shipped, we have seen a number of interesting applications being developed with connectivity to social media and tracking capabilities of images and locations.
There have been apps such as Twitter’s Glass App, Ice Breaker, and several additional ones that have been developed early show some significant promise to what day to day applications these devices will be able to be used for.
A recent Glass App was introduced by Lance Nanek called MedRef , is looking to change the way care givers would potentially pull medical records by. The application with its use of cloud based Face search where patients photos are stored and a site called Betaface provides the APIs that will enable the Google Glass user to simply look at the person and be able to retrieve their identity based the photo captured by the device. The application also provides the ability to add notes and perform other tasks. Some of these activities performed would help generate additional documentation on the patients and add to their digital medical records.
As we look as some of the other potential use cases that Google Glasses combined with Facial recognition and augmented reality, one can only imagine that soon we will be able to perform the following:
- Physicians as they enter a patient room can identify patients using facial recognition and pull their chart.
- Augmented reality can provide stats and alerts on patient at point of care as well as potential simulations during surgery
- Documentation can be captured using voice recognition and with the use of CLU or other voice recognition engines that use NER (Named Entity Recognition) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) follow ups and other items can be added to the medical record quickly
There are several opportunities with the use of this Google device. The potential for many more additional things that can be accomplished through the combination of Google Glasses and some of the tools available in the market place. However, as privacy issues continue to be a concern when it comes to these popular gadgets, Healthcare organizations will likely wait to see some more real world use cases and what safeguards can be put in place to ensure the security of the data being collected and transmitted from these devices.