Healthcare has always been complex, but the 21st century brought with it unprecedented challenges for the healthcare sector. Rising complexity, soaring costs of medical care, shortage of qualified medical practitioners, and demand for more personalized patient have all added to the already complex situation.

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The incredible rise of IoT devices, AI and ML along with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) is giving an entirely new direction and meaning to the healthcare industry across the globe.  Mobile phones, wearables, and head mounted displays have completely changed the ways how the real world and virtual objects are establishing interaction with each other. 

This has completely transformed the way healthcare services are delivered, and how patients are being taken care of by healthcare providers. 

Alternate realities offer mammoth possibilities for the healthcare sector.  Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have gone beyond the point of being new buzzwords to being incredibly powerful tools in patient care.

The new technology is completely changing the ways as to how medical care is administered, finding extensive usage in education, stress induced disorders, medical presentations, 3D data visualization, vein or surgical visualization, medical equipment maintenance, PTSD cure, rehabilitation, and overall speeding up recovery in patients.

In the following paragraphs, we shall look at the role of augmented reality in medical care, and how the technology is making a real difference in medicine. We shall also see how a reputable augmented reality company can help medical centers, hospitals, and healthcare providers derive huge monetary benefits and customer satisfaction from application of AR and VR in the healthcare industry.

Augmented reality: the future of healthcare

AR is proving to be one of the most talked-about digital health technologies at present. Here’s few of the most promising applications of AR in the healthcare industry.

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AR allows patients to better describe symptoms

It is often seen that patients find it hard to express their exact medical conditions or symptoms to doctors. Some patients over react to their medical conditions, whereas some often take it very lightly—both situations are incrementally detrimental to a patient’s overall health. 

In certain medical fields such as ophthalmology, augmented reality can help patients accurately describe their symptoms, and take good care of their health.

For example, Oculenz is an app for patients with central vision loss. Using apps like Oculenz, doctors can show the simulation of the vision of a patient suffering from a specific condition.

Patients aware of how the vision loss can affect their life, may be coaxed into taking better care of their health.

Nurses can find veins easier with augmented reality

Medtech startup AccuVein is using AR technology to make administering intravenous injections extremely easy thus helping both nurses and patients. Reports show that over 40% of IVs (intravenous injections) miss the vein on the first stick; the situation worsens further when it comes to children and the elderly.

AR technology can help medical professionals get better with intravenous injections as a handheld scanner projected over the skin shows nurses the exact location of veins in the patients’ bodies. As per estimates the app has been used on more than 10 million patients, augmenting chances of finding a vein in the patients 4 times more likely. 

Physical therapy

Through immersive technology, artificial reality-based solution can be employed to motivate a patient to fully cooperate during the therapy sessions by providing an interactive environment. The technology can also be used to provide relevant data about the body’s movement.

The technology provides immersive, interactive artificial environments that make it extremely easy for patients to engage wholeheartedly into doing physical therapy exercises. For example, for patients suffering from fractional immobility of a limb, virtual reality can lessen the trauma through projection of an image of limb that is not working, and is controlled by the patient’s movement of the working right hand.

Hololens aiding in study of anatomy 

Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic have partnered with tech giant Microsoft to build an app called HoloAnatomy for visualization of the human body in unheard of ways.

With Microsoft’s HoloLens Headset, app users can see everything from muscles to the tiniest veins before their eyes on a dynamic holographic model. This is revolutionary technology with the potential to help deliver medical education in a spectacular way as students can see the human body in 3D instead of the traditional black-and-white pictures, diagrams, and text material in medical books.

Conclusion

Goldman Sachs forecasts that the use of AR and VR in the healthcare industry will cross $5 billion in the next couple of years, while another report by different research predicts the market to be worth $6.5 billion by 2025. Adoption of AR and VR technology is expected to drive the digitization of healthcare, which in turn will make healthcare more accessible, affordable and innovative. 

A top-rated augmented reality services provider can leverage the technology to aid healthcare industry tackle disease outbreak and preventions, patient monitoring, therapy planning and help with better diagnosis, and treatment.

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This content was originally published here.