We’ve already seen many incredible and potential uses for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) in medical and health fields, and yet more advancements are being made in the field. Now, Birmingham City University has developed a new mixed reality system that’ll help doctors view patient data and more.
The AR and MR hybrid will project diagrams, patient information, virtual replicas of patients’ organs, bones and more.
The interface will allow practitioners to easily view data and organise it in a 3D space using hand motions and gestures. The hopes is that it’ll allow doctors to easily showcase a variety of things, medical procedures, lifestyle choices, etc., quickly and conveniently.
Being easily able to pinpoint certain location on a 3D representation of a body, for example, to a small audience will be much less uncomfortable for the person having the surgery than actually having to be there in person. It can also be used to discuss areas on a patient’s body directly with the patient with the diagrams giving accurate and important information.
Birmingham City University’s Dr Ian Williams hopes this will make things easier on practitioners; “We are developing this system as a platform to allow medical professionals to interact with genuine patient data and manipulate it by hand to educate and inform patients.”
Dr Williams continues; “The real advantages this brings are being able to visually demonstrate parts of the anatomy, using virtual models which can be customised for each patient and show how they have been impacted by lifestyle choices or how they may be changed following treatments or surgery.”
University staff are still looking at other MR and AR projects, and as soon as we hear about them, you’ll be able to read all of the latest developments on VRFocus.