Using Wearable Augmented Reality to Augment Skills for Public Health Providers

Background Ranging from inner city and rural injuries to world disasters, civilians rely on the heroic acts of emergency public health workers and clinicians assuming the roles of public health workers to administer life saving interventions including, but not limited to the following: • Treatment of gastrointestinal, respiratory, and vector-borne illnesses. • Treatment of Provision of health services to prevent maternal and infant death • Treatment of kidney failure due to crush injuries. • Treatment to prevent deaths from infected wounds. • Prevention and treatment of inflamed lung tissue caused by concrete dust. • Traveling to underserved countries to deliver surgical care.

Shrinking U.S. health care budgets and increasing large-scale catastrophic events in international countries stifled with economic challenges result in a scarcity of medical resources and correspondingly require effective casualty care/triage management and clinical care providers with multi-disciplinary skills to provide extended care services at lower costs to significantly minimize preventable morbidity and mortality.

To provide emergency public health teams with on-demand assistance to provide evidence based treatment for the aforementioned needs and improve the delivery of care throughout the disaster response continuum, wearable augmented reality (AR) technology intervention demonstrates the promise of augmenting human cognitive capabilities and increasing public health learning proficiency. Wearable AR has the potential to provide disaster response teams with a mobile, real-time data-transmission service, and facilitate hands-free access to medical data that currently does not exists.

Objective/Purpose The objective of this session is to discuss recent results of how wireless enabled wearable AR can serve as a wearable telehealth tool to assist emergency public health teams provide effective clinical care to catastrophic casualties in international countries while collaborating with expert health clinicians around the world to increase casualty care.

Methods A panel of wearable AR investigators have conducted experiments demonstrating the health care efficacy of clinicians administering wearing AR to improve health care training and care delivery.

Results Preliminary results indicated that the experimental group (i.e., wearing the AR headset) that provided immediate access to “how to perform” various medical tasks significantly decrease time and error in comparison to the control group.

Discussion/Conclusion Preliminary results indicate that for the aforementioned tasks, the wearable AR headset intervention demonstrates the promise for improving the performance emergency public health responders by decreasing their time and error on public health casualty management.