Head mounted display based augmented reality device for medical applications
Rae Smith, Jim T. Schwiegerling · 2023
Augmented Reality (AR) is emerging as an innovative frontier in medical applications. The ability to provide preoperative training, thorough explanation and demonstration of procedures to patients, and intra-operative information and navigation are among many valuable use cases. Head mounted display (HMD) based AR devices are particularly promising for use in medical settings due to their hands-free capabilities. HMD AR devices have shown immense promise in the effort to produce better trained surgeons and to pioneer new risk-reduced surgical protocols to advance modern medicine. Current studies on the benefit of HMD AR in medical applications have been limited to off-the-shelf devices which are not specifically tailored for their use cases. Most FDA approved devices for AR in medical applications are off-the-shelf as well. However, specific use case tailoring may potentially improve HMD AR device use further for medical settings. This study proposes a HMD AR device tailored for use in medical applications. This proposed design shall contain the expected hallmarks of a user-friendly HMD AR device such as lightweight design and high see-through transmittance, with particular attention paid to facets that affect medical applications: battery longevity (for continued use during surgery) and display brightness (for use in bright operating room environments).