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Smart Glasses in Palliative Care: Advantages, Applications, and Barriers

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, awareness of video communication has grown enormously, including in palliative care. Just make a video call with a colleague to see the situation with a patient, or to go through a document together, it’s all possible. There has also been more awareness of video calling with the rise in the use of smart glasses.

With such smart glasses, video calling is slightly different from video calling with a laptop, tablet or smartphone. The use of smart glasses offers specific advantages, also in the palliative terminal care.

Benefits of smart glasses

Specific benefits for the use of smart glasses are seen in:

  • Sharing the patient’s situation with a remote healthcare professional for clinical/medical assessment. This allows healthcare professionals to make quick choices. For example, a GP can use smart glasses to remotely assess the situation and decide whether a home visit is necessary immediately or whether it can take place later in the day.
  • Showing how an action should be performed in a specific, personalized way. A valuable feature of smart glasses is that the hands remain free during use.
  • Application in practice

    Others in healthcare also see added value in using smart glasses. For example, healthcare institution Treant uses smart glasses to allow a healthcare professional to remotely monitor wound care at clients’ homes. Treant also expects future use of smart glasses in the collaboration between geriatric specialists and triage nurses.

    An important factor for Treant to use smart glasses is to reduce travel time. But additional options of the smart glasses also provide the healthcare professional with a complete picture remotely for targeted treatment advice.

    Conditions and barriers

    In addition to the described advantages for the use of smart glasses in interdisciplinary collaboration, challenges are also seen. For example, healthcare professionals working in palliative terminal care indicated that it is important to adequately inform the patient and relatives in advance about its use.

    The use of smart glasses means that there are different lines of communication at the same time, whereby the patient and loved one are not (properly) directly involved in the communication line that is established between different healthcare professionals through the use of smart glasses. Inability to properly follow an interdisciplinary group discussion by the patient and his or her loved ones certainly also applies in palliative terminal care.

    Read the full article in edition 6 of ICT&health, which will be published around December 20.

    2023-12-21 05:55:00
    #Smart #glasses #palliative #terminal #care #holy #grail #ICThealth #official #knowledge #platform #healthcare #innovation

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