Clinical and surgical applications of smart glasses

With the increased efforts to adopt health information technology in the healthcare field, many innovative devices have emerged to improve patient care, increase efficiency, and decrease healthcare costs. A recent addition is smart glasses: web-connected glasses that can present data onto the lenses and record images or videos through a front-facing camera.

In this article, we review the most salient uses of smart glasses in healthcare, while also denoting their limitations including practical capabilities and patient confidentiality.

Using keywords including, but not limited to, ``smart glasses'', ``healthcare'', ``evaluation'', ``privacy'', and ``development'', we conducted a search on Ovid-MEDLINE, PubMed, and Google Scholar. A total of 71 studies were included in this review.

Smart glasses have been adopted into the healthcare setting with several useful applications including, hands-free photo and video documentation, telemedicine, Electronic Health Record retrieval and input, rapid diagnostic test analysis, education, and live broadcasting.

In order for the device to gain acceptance by medical professionals, smart glasses will need to be tailored to fit the needs of medical and surgical sub-specialties. Future studies will need to qualitatively assess the benefits of smart glasses as an adjunct to the current health information technology infrastructure.