

Boston hospital experiments with Google Glass in ER  - ilamont
http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2014/03/wearable-computing-at-bidmc.html?m=1

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Fomite
Now, like all pieces of medical equipment, it would probably good to culture
some swabs off them to see what's growing, and how hard they are to clean.

~~~
jebus989
Huh, why would that be good? Why is the sterility of a doctor's eye-wear a
concern?

Tabloid scare-stories of "X species of bacteria found living on Y" just feed
on the public's ignorance of microbiology; i.e. "wow that many on the average
toothbrush!"... well, how many are found in your mouth? In the intestines? How
do we define a bacterial species?

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Fomite
The sterility of a doctor's eye-wear is a concern because of the following
simple scenario:

A doctor has been seeing patients all day, and visits one with an active C.
difficile infection. They touch the patient's bed (which has been shown to be
as contaminated with organism as the skin), and then, before they change their
gloves, adjust their glasses - transferring the pathogen to a surface it can
likely persist on for some span of time.

Later that day, they adjust their glasses again (seriously, I do this like 20
times a day), and recontaminate their hands before examining another patient.

Glasses - along with _shoes_ , ties, lab coats, cell phones, etc. represent
potential sources of cross contamination between patients, and are an active
area of scientific and medical research.

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jessriedel
Let's rephrase: why would glass be any different than a doctor's normal
glasses? If it's not, then are you just saying "we should probably treat this
like their glasses, i.e. do research but currently do nothing special in a
clinical setting"?

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eric_h
I'm willing to bet Google Glass has a lot more nooks and crannies for the
little bugs to hide than a normal pair of eyeglasses.

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Fomite
> Yea, and smartphone have a lot fewer nooks than traditional cell phones
> since they have no keys. Better do a study to see if we should recommend
> that all doctors upgrade from their old Nokia!

Um...trying to figure out what to do about smartphones and the contaminants
they carry is a very active area of discussion in infection control right now.

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eric_h
Yes, but you can not use a smart phone while treating patients. If you're
using Google Glass, you can't really not use it, especially if the reason
you're wearing it is to help patients.

I do believe this is a solvable problem (as do the people working on it, I'd
imagine), but it hasn't been solved yet.

Perhaps a sealant on the device plus a cleaning regimen will do the trick, but
right now I'd put google glass somewhere near neckties (glad that that's been
largely dealt with), lab coats and, well, pretty much anything that has places
that will readily harbor foreign bacteria as a terrible thing to wear from
room to room in a hospital.

So I guess that given the state of things right now (riddled with such
harbors), it's perfectly reasonable to give the technical benefits of glass a
try. Maybe we'll come up with some good software that will save some lives.

(This may seem like a retraction, but I was really just comparing Google Glass
vs regular glasses in my original reply).

[Edit] this was intended as a reply to the person the parent was quoting.

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kitd
Interesting article, but 2 things stood out:

1\. "Google Glass immediately recognizes the room and then the ED Dashboard
sends information about the patient in that room to the glasses"

This sounds like a redundant level of indirection. Why not just have a
patient-unique QR code on the bed?

2\. Very OT, but the use of "emergently" made me bristle. "Emergent" has a
very well-established meaning that is not "very urgent". Sorry, end of rant.

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diydsp
> emergently.

As a self-styled knitpicker and guardian of language, I had to look it up. The
references I found [1] [2] indicated emergent _can_ mean calling for immediate
action or urgent, however, it's only in the weakest use of the word. And I
find the adverb form of the word another step weaker.

I believe the definition you're highlighting is related to the dictionary
definitions referring to "appearing casually or unexpectedly," such as
emergent phenomena, which are, arguably slow. These near opposite meanings of
the word are unfortunate, b/c people don't really know what sentences using
the word are supposed to mean: Is an emergent page one that appeared gradually
over time or one that must be attended to immediately?

I find the author's repeated use of the word clumsy and non-descriptive.
Exactly the kind of trendy abuse of a word to signal self-entitled and
undeserved superiority. To get paged emergently doesn't describe the process
of getting paged for an urgent issue, since the action of paging is different
from the issue (how was the page button pressed?). To "emergently reverse"
blood thinners could just as easily have been stated as "quickly, immediately,
or urgently."

Therefore, I would follow your suggestion and drop use of the word as a high-
falootin' synonym of "urgently."

[1]
[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/emergent](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/emergent)

[2] [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emergent](http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/emergent)

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jessriedel
"Emergently" used in this sense is extremely common medical lingo and has
nothing to do with the author. It sounds like you're judging this physician
based on your own ignorance of the parlance of _his_ field. There's no need to
check how Merriam-Webster thinks the _general population_ uses the term.

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caio1982
"We replaced all the Google components on the devices so that no data travels
over Google servers. All data stays within the BIDMC firewall."

I'd love to know more about that.

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hahainternet
It's just a small Android strapped to the side of your head. Google 'AOSP'.

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caio1982
Thanks for the hint but I think that was obvious. My point is: the quote makes
it seem easier than it is to do such thing and still be 100% confident and
sure you will never ever have a confidentiality or privacy breach with
patients data involved. Google Glass is fantastic but also very scary for a
lot of people, I can't even imagine how that would turn out inside a hospital.

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VikingCoder
"still be 100% confident and sure you will never ever have a confidentiality
or privacy breach with patients data involved"

That is never true, ever, in any circumstance, with any system, ever.

Stop wishing for unicorns and come back to the real world.

The question is, is it reasonably safe, and does it help patient outcomes?
Keep in mind, the more likely it is to improve patient outcomes, the more risk
is considered acceptable.

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sailfast
The example in the article of the physician being able to respond quickly to a
brain bleed and an allergic reaction because of information available on Glass
was very compelling.

While it may not be practical right now for a lot of hospital use cases, being
able to react quickly with data at your fingertips for emergency medicine
seems like a great use of the tech. I'm sure the utility will only expand as
the technology and the software integration improves.

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jchernan
Was the post deleted? It is still cached

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xB8946F...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xB8946FgopQJ:geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2014/03/wearable-
computing-at-bidmc.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

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mfrommil
I won't be surprised to see products like this grow into a huge industry. Just
imagine... surgeons wearing Glass or a Glass-like device which can alert the
surgeon to abnormalities while performing surgery. Or have a HUD for the
surgeon to monitor all sorts of data while performing surgery.

What if a "normal" doctor could pull up a patient's information while chatting
with them, and have the current chat (which usually goes something like: "Any
new problems?" "No." "Started smoking recently?" "No.") transcribed to the
patient's file. Way less clunky than reading through the manila envelope of
charts.

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MichaelGG
The scenario about being in ER and needing the patient's allergy medication,
how did the doctor access the info on Glass? Was it just always on screen? Or
voice activated? Could the same effect be achieved with a "Star Trek" style
computer? The doctor would say the same command. I guess I can see how it
might be more convenient in some situations to have it as visual info instead
of a voice response.

I'm curious as to why Glass would bring about changes in medical care. For
instance, I hear someone was interested in using it in surgery to record
things. But certainly the basic technology of a head-mounted spycam has been
around for quite some time. I was under the impression that Glass's innovation
was making a hip, consumer-level product. Not that Glass brought new camera
technology, for instance.

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pothibo
Ok, so hospital is one of the place that are so far behind in term of
technology and someone had the idea of using google glass in ER.

Priorities seem to be a hard thing to do in hospitals.

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puzzlingcaptcha
BIDMC is not exactly some struggling rural hospital with cold war era x-ray
machines.

~~~
pothibo
I wasn't talking about the diagnostic equipment, I was talking about the
patient history infrastructures.

I'm actually more knowledgeable about Canada's health infrastructure but I'm
pretty sure they share some characteristics.

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Fomite
> I'm actually more knowledgeable about Canada's health infrastructure but I'm
> pretty sure they share some characteristics.

Not really. The heterogenity of healthcare in the U.S. means things like
access to patient information ranges from Extensive to the Point of Being
Spooky (Kaiser) to "Who are you again?"

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blueskin_
>We replaced all the Google components on the devices so that no data travels
over Google servers.

This sounds intriguing. I think aside from the privacy issues, google glasses
are stupid because many people don't _want_ to wear glasses, but being able to
have a CyanogenMod-type firmware for google glasses would at least remove the
privacy risk to the user, if not for other people in the area.

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sharkweek
I've shared this video before because I love the concept of augmented vision
in this type of capacity. It might seem a little farfetched now, but I could
see how something like Google Glass could reshape the medical and research
fields:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orXws08ODiQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orXws08ODiQ)

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Chirael
A sanitized version with much less information was posted:
[http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2014/03/wearable-computing-
at...](http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2014/03/wearable-computing-at-
bidmc_12.html)

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ilbe
This sounds incredibly useful in a hospital/emergency room. A definite step up
from the use case of walking around town blinking to take pictures. Anyway to
see more screenshots?

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anonketo
Link seems to be broken now. Too bad.

BIDMC in general is at the top of the health IT development and practice game.
Good for them for expanding into glassware!

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shahzad_76
This link works correctly [http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2014/03/wearable-
computing-at...](http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2014/03/wearable-computing-at-
bidmc_12.html?m=1)

