Head Mounted Display Augmented Reality Device for Medical Applications

Augmented Reality (AR) is emerging as an innovative frontier in medical applications. The ability to provide preoperative training, thorough explanation and demonstration of procedures to patients, and intra-operative information and navigation are among many valuable use cases. Head mounted display (HMD) based AR devices are particularly promising for use in medical settings due to their hands-free capabilities. HMD AR devices have shown immense promise in the effort to produce better trained surgeons and to pioneer new risk-reduced surgical protocols to advance modern medicine. Current studies on the benefit of HMD AR in medical applications have been limited to off-the-shelf devices which are not specifically tailored for their use cases. Most FDA approved devices for AR in medical applications are off-the-shelf as well. However, specific use case tailoring may potentially improve HMD AR device use further for medical settings. This study proposes a HMD AR device tailored for use in medical applications. This proposed design shall contain the expected hallmarks of a user-friendly HMD AR device such as lightweight design and high see-through transmittance, with particular attention paid to facets that affect medical applications: battery longevity (for continued use during surgery) and display brightness (for use in bright operating room environments).