Humanities is at a crossroads. Over the last 200 years we’ve been able to achieve what in earlier times would have been described as miracles through our mastery of science and technology we’ve been able to achieve the unimaginable. The acceleration we’ve seen in digital innovation and change is faster than ever before. Through this increased efficiency and productivity we’ve been able to increase wealth and social mobility, and with advances in healthcare we’ve almost doubled the life expectancy of the last 200 years and populations have reached unprecedented levels. Thus, this poses a stark challenge. Do we have the resources to cope with this vast population ? And if not, whose responsibility is it to find a solution ?
Economists might sum this as a problem of supply and demand. As a result of our success we need more than we can provide. In other words, there is just not enough surgical expertise to go around and as a result 70% of the world’s population lack access to surgical care. So how do we redistribute this expertise around the world ? How do we force multiply what we already have ?
Simple answer Augmented Reality.
Augmented Reality is a technology that senses the physical world to the specific lenses or devices and projects additional information onto the existing environment. There is a huge difference between AR and Virtual Reality, although the two are often mixed up. VR shuts out everything completely and provides and entire simulation while AR lets us see the real world too.
AR can bring significant even life-saving information into physicians field of vision.
If there is a complicated operation but there isn’t much time for checking whether the patient has a certain type of allergy so the physician could see the relevant data on their AR screen in seconds.
Furthermore, Radiology images could be projected onto the organs to during operations to help surgeons do there jobs even better
Finally, answering to our proposed questions Augmented Reality had allowed the creators of STAR invent a platform that enables surgeons to virtually transport themselves to any clinical setting anywhere in the world to visually and practically interact with another doctor in real time guiding them through procedures step by step.
To conclude, it seems like AR is able to bring to the world breakthroughs that we haven’t imagined yet. And probably solve problems that we thought are impossible. Do you believe that AR is going to someday takeover the human’s jobs ?
Sources:
The Lancet Global Health : Global access to surgical care: a modelling study
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(15)70115-4/fulltext
The Engineer: Augmented reality for remote surgery mentoring
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/augmented-reality-for-remote-surgery-mentoring/
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