Smart Glasses and Augmented Reality to Support Healthcare

Augmented Reality (AR) holds considerable promise in transforming clinical practice by enabling hands-free, real-time access to critical information. This paper examines the current state, challenges, and prospects of integrating AR smart glasses in healthcare environments through a human-centred design framework. Despite technological advances and promising pilot studies, the widespread clinical adoption of AR remains limited due to issues in comfort, spatial accuracy, usability, and insufficient clinical validation. Smart glasses and head-mounted displays (HMDs) such as Microsoft HoloLens have demonstrated their utility in surgical settings, medical training, and remote collaboration. These systems enhance situational awareness and procedural efficiency by overlaying digital information within the clinician’s field of view. However, significant barriers such as ergonomic discomfort, inadequate integration with electronic health records (EHR), cognitive overload, and limited interoperability with hospital systems hinder broader acceptance. The EU-funded POPULAR project addresses these limitations by proposing a human-centred AR Eyewear (ARE) platform tailored for clinical settings. This platform emphasises ergonomic design, ophthalmic customisation, and context-sensitive data presentation, aligning with healthcare workflows and professional needs. A user-centric methodology underpins the development process, involving qualitative and quantitative research with healthcare professionals and educators. Through interviews, focus groups, and usability benchmarking, “training in medical procedures” emerged as the primary application area. Additional functionalities such as vital sign projection, procedural alerts, and medical history access were also prioritised. Early-stage prototypes with side-mounted and top-mounted projection systems underwent testing at the Medical University of Lodz (MUL). Field trials under simulated emergency scenarios revealed user preferences for side-mounted configurations due to superior comfort and visibility. Continuous participant feedback informed iterative design refinements, improving usability and acceptance. The study found that visual clarity, optimal fit, and seamless information integration into clinical tasks are critical to long-term adoption. Despite these advances, challenges remain. Data security and patient privacy concerns are paramount, especially when AR systems incorporate real-time audio-visual capture and EHR access. Additional barriers include device weight, thermal discomfort, and steep learning curves. The successful deployment of smart glasses in healthcare requires addressing these multifaceted issues through robust encryption, ergonomic engineering, intuitive interfaces, and structured user training. Looking ahead, further clinical validation and large-scale deployment are necessary to confirm the effectiveness and safety of AR smart glasses in real-world healthcare scenarios. By embedding user feedback throughout the development cycle, smart glasses can evolve into reliable tools that enhance care quality, clinical efficiency, and professional satisfaction across diverse medical contexts.