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The authors are from the Department of Orthopaedics (BAP, MEM, LOO, CTF), University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama; and the Department of Orthopaedics, Emory University (PKD), Atlanta, Georgia.
The authors have no relevant financial relationships to disclose.
Surgery is a highly methodological field constantly in need of technological advancements aimed at improving patient outcomes while facilitating cost-effective treatment strategies, knowledge transfer, and skill acquisition.1â[euro]"4 For a technology to have application to surgery, it must offer utility in a portable, fiscally responsible package.
Wearable computing devices such as Google Glass (GG) (Google Inc, Mountain View, California) have recently aroused the interest of the medical community. In contrast to traditional video-conferencing platforms, GG is a device with an optical head-mounted display that possesses the ability to capture and display audio and video images in real time while interacting with the surrounding environment. Flexible mobile platforms such as GG could hold considerable potential in furthering the development of telemedicine (ie, the remote diagnosis and treatment of patients by means of telecommunications technology) as a tool to spread time-sensitive medical expertise to areas that are physically difficult to reach.5â[euro]"7
Google Glass has been tested in several academic medical centers worldwide to stream live point-of-view footage from surgeries to the medical community.8â[euro]"11 Early adopters have praised the deviceâ[euro](TM)s portability and ease of use; however, real-time broadcasts of operative cases using traditional videoconferencing platforms over the Internet have been reported since the late 1990s.12â[euro]"14 Currently, no peer-reviewed reports have described limitations or potential concerns with adoption of this tool by the surgical community. Of the more than 16,000 citations for â[euro]oetelemedicineâ[euro] on PubMed (Medline), fewer than 250 pertain to surgery, suggesting that the rapid growth in telehealth has largely not affected the realm of surgery.
Augmented reality is a separate emerging technology that also has a promising future in medicine and especially in surgery.15â[euro]"17 Whereas virtual reality replaces the real world with a simulated one, augmented reality can be defined as enhancing an individualâ[euro](TM)s visual experience with the real world through the integration of digital visual elements. The Virtual Interactive Presence and Augmented Reality (VIPAAR) system, an augmented reality platform conceptualized and developed at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has effectively demonstrated the practicality and potential usefulness of virtual...