Smart Glasses for Anesthesia Care: Initial Focus Group Interviews with Specialized Health Care Professionals

Abstract

Smart glasses are a kind of wearable technology that gives users sustained, hands-free access to data and can transmit and receive information wirelessly. Earlier studies have suggested that smart glasses have the potential to improve patient safety in anesthesia care. Research regarding health care professionals' views of the potential use of smart glasses in anesthesia care is limited. The purpose of this study was to describe anesthesia health care professionals' views of smart glasses before clinical use. Design: A qualitative descriptive study. Methods: Data were collected from focus group interviews and analyzed using thematic content analysis. Findings: Three categories of participants' views of smart glasses were created during the analysis: views of integrating smart glasses in clinical setting; views of customized functionality of smart glasses; and views of being a user of smart glasses. One theme, striving for situational control, was identified in the analysis. Conclusions: Smart glasses were seen as a tool that can impact and improve access to patient-related information, and aid health care professionals in their struggle to gain situational control during anesthesia care. These are factors related to increased patient safety.

Nurse anesthetists’ experiences using smart glasses to monitor patients’ vital signs during anesthesia care: A qualitative study

“…Connectivity, frequent system shut-downs and restarts, and battery life caused irritation. This was also an area about which anesthesia HCPs were apprehensive before clinical use [18]. The results do not provide information about whether the technical problems NAs encountered in this study were caused by the Wi-Fi, the customized application, or by the SG as platform, or if they were a combination of the aforementioned reasons.…”

“…This finding is supported by others [27,30], and the possibility to improve alarm management with SG is endorsed for future development. This feature was highlighted before clinical use in both an anesthesia- [18] and intensive care context [17]. A review of physiological monitor alarms found that between 74-99% of them were non-actionable, and an increasing number of alarms was associated with longer response time from nurses [49].…”

“…SG require a tailored software (application) for each context and purpose [15,16]. HCPs' requests regarding both quality of use and desired VSs to make SG a tool for clinical monitoring of VSs and a part of surveillance has recently been described [17,18]. The innovation project SUCCCE used i.a.…”

“…Registration of interest to participate in the test group for SG was gathered in connection with an earlier study [18]. Besides that, all HCPs employed at the unit who were interested in participating in the test group could report their interest to the second author (PE) who works as a NA at the unit in which the feasibility tests were conducted.…”

“…The tailored application provided ECG, pulse, blood pressure (invasive or non-invasive), oxygen saturation, and end tidal carbon dioxide. VSs were presented numerically, and/or as an associated curve, as requested by HCPs when their views of SG prior to clinical use were described [18]. Participants could decide whether VSs should be presented only numerically, or with numbers and an associated curve.…”