Hands-Free Electronic Documentation in Emergency Care Work Through Smart Glasses

Abstract

As U.S. healthcare system moves towards digitization, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are increasingly adopted by medical providers. However, EHR documentation is not only time-consuming but also difficult to complete in real-time, leading to delayed, missing, or erroneous data entry. This challenge is more evident in time-critical and hands-busy clinical domains, such as Emergency Medical Services (EMS). In recent years, smart glasses have gained momentum in supporting various aspects of clinical care. However, limited research has examined the potential of smart glasses in automating electronic documentation during fast-paced medical work. In this paper, we report the design, development, and preliminary evaluations of a novel system combining smart glasses and EHRs and leveraging natural language processing (NLP) techniques to enable hands-free, real-time documentation in the context of EMS care. Although optimization is needed, our system prototype represents a substantive departure from the status quo in the documentation technology for emergency care providers, and has a high potential to enable real-time documentation while accounting for care providers’ cognitive and physical constraints imposed by the time-critical medical environment.