Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Google Glass Progress Report

Our teams continue to work on Google Glass applications for Emergency Department workflow improvement.   Here's a photo of our team at work with a stealthy startup developing healthcare solutions on Google Glass.



Issues we've had to address include decision making about thin client web versus thick client functionality, enabling a persistent secure network connection, and ensuring secure data flows through servers.

At the moment we are optimizing the user experience and beginning our study design to record patient reactions and clinician experiences.

If patients object we will not use Glass for their encounter.  Quantifying patient reactions will be very useful.  We are still working out how we will do this.

I'll report back as soon as we have experience in actual use.

3 comments:

Ricky said...

We have several sets of Glass at Duke as well and are investigating these same issues (Mirror API vs GDK, enterprise WiFi authentication and secure communication). I've been in contact with Google regarding these issues as I'm sure your team has been as well. I'd be happy to connect with your team to compare notes.

Ricky Bloomfield, MD
Director, Mobile Technology Strategy
Duke Health Technology Solutions

Anonymous said...

John and Rick

I agree there is alot of interest in Google Glass. We are beginning our work with medical informatics uses of these devices. I think it may be more acceptable to use them behind the scenes until there is more experience with who patients react.

It is a great benefit for us to be sharing lessons learned.

Todd Rowland MD
CEO
HealthLINC HIE

Anonymous said...

As a patient, I *might* be glad for the ER staff to pull information to their glasses to assist in my care, but would not want to allow pushing any info -- which must, by design, be principally from the camera. I would ask developers for a global, over-arching "one-way information flow" setting. Alas, given such a restriction, perhaps it's a tough haul to make Glass more worthwhile than a tablet, except for maybe being more sanitary. Besides, if the doc really wants to send data -- other than photos -- voice or fingers are faster. Maybe it's a small-minded bias, and all ER staff should walk around recording video 100% of the time! (Just imagine staff with "glasses-guards" and these things dangling from their necks when not in use:-)

Now that I think about it, for the first 5 years or so, I'd probably want to avoid any loss of visual concentration on *me* so I'll just insist they take the damn thing off and shut it in a drawer. Ugh, there's another metric for your developers to try to come up with, namely eye-tracking vs. outcome-tracking, i.e. does Glass contribute to losing track of specific visible symptoms. Call me when the first study results are in... Honestly, I'd rather find this and similar answers with a test run on auto mechanics than ER docs.