Smart glasses in healthcare

How can primary care implement Smart Glasses? How can we deploy smart glasses to support healthcare providers of the future? What are the challenges in remote expertise deployment? These questions form the breeding ground of the unique TETRA project SCOBE, smart glasses to coach and guide primary care.

Field of interest: Health and Care

Duration: 1/06/2023 - 31/05/2025

Financing: VLAIO

What?

Every day, thousands of healthcare professionals take to the road to treat a multitude of patients and provide them with quality care. Socially, there is a strong reassessment of the important role these professionals perform in the first-line of health care.

Both extramural facilities and residential care centres have experienced an ever-increasing workload in recent years. This is due to the shift from inpatient services to outpatient services, an ageing population and increased complexity of care.

This means that many workers are needed to cope with this pressure. Many new colleagues consequently also put even more pressure on the shoulders of more experienced colleagues to get the necessary, quality training. On top of this, with the shift from intra- to extramural care, more is expected of front-line health workers. Getting expertise on site remains a major challenge for these facilities. The need for interdisciplinary consultation and consultation is also there, but often cannot be provided immediately due to various reasons.

Smart glasses can help here. A mentor or expert can watch a new colleague from a distance and make adjustments where necessary (e.g. for wound care, oncological care, etc.). As a result, smart glasses offer a solution for remote expertise, coaching of employees, but also for team discussions and intervision moments.

What do we want to achieve?

More and more care organisations have increased interest in optimising their onboarding process, deploying expertise in the right place and organising intervision moments with colleagues. This in order to work more efficiently, which can bring benefits, both for the organisation, for caregivers and for care recipients.

In this project, together with a consortium of work field partners and commercial partners, we want to take the necessary research and development steps to also make this innovation a reality in primary care.

Specifically, we want to answer the following questions:

How can these healthcare organisations use smart glasses efficiently in the onboarding process of new employees?
How can healthcare organisations use smart glasses in intervision moments?
How can the expertise of persons in specific fields, through smart glasses, reach other employees within healthcare organisations?
Which functionalities are needed for this in the smart glasses?
What path can we create to achieve implementation of smart glasses in healthcare organisations?