Google Glass has reached another milestone in its history when Dr. Rafael Grossmann used the device to record a surgery he was performing.
Dr. Rafael Grossmann, of the Eastern Maine Medical Center, recently performed his first Google surgery with Google Glass. It’s also the first such Google Glass-equipped surgery in the device’s history – complete with a corresponding Google Glass Hangout.
“By performing and documenting this event, I wanted to show that this device and its platform, are certainly intuitive tools that have a great potential in Healthcare, and specifically for surgery, could allow better intra-operative consultations, surgical mentoring and potentiate remote medical education, in a very simple way,” Grossmann writes.[more…]
For his first surgery with Google Glass, Grossmann chose a simple procedure, inserting a feeding tube, so that his full focus could be on the patient and not on glass.
He streamed the surgery via a Google Hang-Out. What was recorded through his Google Glass lens during the surgery was output on an iPad just a few yards away – but, he says, it could have been thousands of miles away.
Grossmann’s main concern with using Glass was concealing patient health information. To do this, he made sure to get consent from the patient and to make sure that no identifying information about the patient was recorded or transmitted during the surgery – a gastrostomy, or the placement of a feeding tube, performed endoscopically — up to and including the patient’s face itself.
With no major complications as a result of his setup — or the surgery — Grossmann appears hopeful that this first, “home-made” attempt can help pave the way for future Google Glass-integrated surgeries going forward. While he purposefully picked a “simple and commonly performed” procedure for his first Glass surgery, perhaps you might be seeing beating hearts and all sorts of other Surgeon Simulator-like experiences in the not-so-distant future.
Read more:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2420852,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03069TX1K0001121
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2346442/First-surgery-conducted-doctor-wearing-Google-glass.html
