NHS Highland looking at "wearable computers"
NHS Highland is collaborating with a hi-tech company to develop healthcare applications for state-of-the-art ‘smart glasses’.
The health board believes that the technology could attract worldwide interest and result in a “significant” income stream.
The smart glasses are effectively a wearable computer with various self-contained mobile apps. Internet connected, they project images onto the lens while allowing the user to function – and see – as normal. They also have a high-resolution camera as well as voice recognition software which turns speech into text.
NHS Highland has set up a board of medics to consider the potential uses to which the smart glasses are put and is keen to hear from interested colleagues, academics and businesses.
However, Alan Whiteside, innovation consultant with NHS Highland’s research, development and innovation department, believes that the glasses could be of particular interest to surgeons and A&E staff.
He said: “It’s early days yet but several clinicians have already indicated that they are very interested in the glasses and have suggested some possible applications.
“The plan is to turn these ideas into reality and take it from there. If things go as we hope, the smart glasses could help to put NHS Highland at the forefront internationally of a technology with vast potential.”
NHS Highland is working on the glasses’ development with Summit Wearable Solutions, an Inverness-based company which is joint venture with a Taiwanese electronics business called Jorjin Technologies. Mr Whiteside recently travelled to Taiwan and China with Summit chief executive Chris Bryson to meet his colleagues and their collaborators and to discuss how NHS Highland can help to develop applications for the smart glasses.
“NHS Highland’s interest is hugely important for us,” said Mr Bryson, a vice-president of Jorjin. “The idea is that we supply the platform – the glasses themselves, which will use Jorjin’s minimising technology – and NHS Highland will help us to develop the applications for them.”
Mr Whiteside added: “If this is commercially successful we would have intellectual property rights and it’s possible that this project could ultimately yield a significant income for us.
“This is the first place in Europe seriously developing digital eyewear for healthcare. I have no doubt that it could put help to NHS Highland on the map as a centre of technological innovation.”
Digital eyewear is fast gaining recognition for its potential in healthcare, not least since the involvement of Google in the field. Smart glasses have already been used in surgery and as a teaching aid for medical students, but Mr Whiteside believes NHS Highland can pioneer new applications which could quickly attract worldwide attention.
Mr Whiteside likened the smart glasses NHS Highland is co-developing to the most up-to-date smart phones, which can be used for anything from having a conversation and shooting a video to playing online games and listening to music.
He said: “We have a brilliant platform technology capable of a wide variety of uses, and we are working within NHS Highland clinicians to determine what those uses might be.
“An example might be endoscopy procedures which necessitate a surgeon constantly refocusing from the patient to a computer screen to see what he is doing. The glasses would mean that the surgeon needn’t do that.”
Among the NHS Highland clinicians who have been shown the glasses is consultant cardiologist Professor Stephen Leslie, who said he believed the technology was “very, very interesting with a lot of potential”.
He said: “I think it is very refreshing to have a clinical dialogue right at the beginning of the development stage to see where the needs of the patients are.”
Professor Leslie said he was particularly attracted to the possibility of using the glasses to get a remote visualisation of a patient who may be many miles away.
He also saw the glasses as having potential in Raigmore Hospital’s catheterisation laboratory (cath lab), where diagnostic imaging equipment is used to visualise the arteries of the heart. The lab has a range of screens which clinicians have to check while a patient is being examined. With the glasses, it would be possible to look at and care for the patient and at the same time view information about heart rate, blood pressure, pulse, etc.
Professor Leslie added that there was also potential for using the glasses to keep a medical, legal record of what was being done to a patient.
