Tele-mentoring using augmented reality technology in healthcare: A systematic review

Abstract

This systematic review aimed to identify how tele-mentoring systems that incorporate augmented reality (AR) technology are being used in healthcare environments. A total of 12 electronic bibliographic databases were searched using the terms “augmented reality”, “tele-mentoring” and “health”. The PRISMA checklist was used as a guide for reporting. The mixed method appraisal tool was used to assess the quality of the included experiments. The data were then analysed using a concept-centric approach and categorised primarily with regards to system performance and task performance measures. A total of 11 randomised controlled trials and 14 non-randomised designs were included for review. Both mentees and mentors assessed the system and task performance according to 25 categories. The feedback of mentees using AR tele-mentoring systems was generally positive. The majority of experiments revealed that the AR system was an effective tele-mentoring device overall and resulted in the effective performance of a procedure. Benefits included improvements in trainees’ confidence, task completion time and reductions in task errors and shifts in focus. However, the systems had limitations, including heaviness of the equipment, inconvenience, discomfort and distraction of wearing devices, limited battery life, the latency of video and audio signals and limited field of view.
 
 Implications for practice or policy:
 
 Health practitioners can apply AR technology to receive and follow real-time annotated instructions verbally and visually from remote experts.
 Technical developers may consider improving AR devices in terms of lighter weight, larger field of view, more ergonomic design, more stable network connection and longer battery life.
 Further AR-related experiments may need to explore AR tele-mentoring systems’ utility across healthcare environments with larger samples, real patient populations in remote settings, cost-benefit analysis and impacts on short- and long-term patient outcomes.

Opportunities and Challenges of Smartglass-Assisted Interactive Telementoring

“…Our current approach has limitations and shortcomings that deserve further study. First, our approach was not the systematic review or meta-review in nature as other researchers have explored [10,11]. We investigated relevant studies mostly using commercially available smartglasses, which might have missed custom-designed prototypical approaches presented earlier than 2015.…”

“…We investigated relevant studies mostly using commercially available smartglasses, which might have missed custom-designed prototypical approaches presented earlier than 2015. Indeed, as it turns out, our approach only covered high-fidelity smartglasses with stable hardware design, but there could be low-fidelity approaches of surgical telementoring applications [10,11] that we have not included in our analysis. Another limitation of our work is that our newly proposed SAIT scenarios are situated outdoor and involves multiple simultaneous user interactions.…”

“…In this section, we review recent attempts at remote collaboration [5] and XR collaboration [6] using wearable displays and various interaction styles [7][8][9] to elicit requirements for effective telementoring. Rather than the systematic review or meta-review approaches elaborated in [10,11], we specifically focus on recent remote collaboration and telementoring studies from 2015 to 2021.…”

“…Despite the differences in who takes the initiative in telementoring, both types of telementoring can benefit from high-definition videoconferencing, wearable technology, robotic telementoring platforms, and augmented reality [30]. For a comprehensive review on surgical, medical, and healthcare telementoring studies, readers are referred to [10,11].…”

An Indoor Navigation Support for the Student Halls of Residence using Augmented Reality: A Design Perspective

“…It is a technology platform that integrates digital visual content into the real-world environment of the user. AR has brought significant advancement in several application areas such as education (Sani et al, 2020;Cai et al, 2019;Vargas et al, 2020), health care (Bui et al, 2021;Gerup et al, 2020), tourism (Williams et al, 2020;Yung & Khoo-Lattimore, 2019), and also in navigation support (Satriadi et al, 2019). In addition, AR technology can be used for both indoor and outdoor activities (Arantes & Lamounier Jr, 2018).…”