Digital Transformation in Health Care: Augmented Reality for Hands-Free Service Innovation
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Digital Transformation in Health Care: Augmented Reality for Hands-Free Service Innovation Kai Klinker 1 & Manuel Wiesche 1
&
Helmut Krcmar 1
# The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Health care professionals regularly require access to information systems throughout their daily work. However, existing smart devices like smartphones and tablets are difficult to use at the point of care, because health care professionals require both hands during their work. Following a design science research approach including ethnographic fieldwork and prototype tests with focus groups, we find that Augmented Reality smart glass applications offer potential for service innovation in the health care sector. Our smart glass prototype supports health care professionals during wound treatment by allowing them to document procedures hands-free while they perform them. Furthermore, we investigate the use of audio based and physical interaction with the smart glasses in a within-subjects design experiment. Keywords Augmented reality . Health care . Digital transformation . Smart devices . Smart services
1 Introduction As administrative burdens in health care have been increasing over the last years, caregivers have less and less time for direct patient care tasks (Seto et al. 2014; Vollmer et al. 2014). Employing smart devices to provide information access for caregivers at the point of care (POC) is thus a promising path to improve outcomes and reduce administrative burdens (van Rooij and Marsh 2016; Beverungen et al. 2017a). Smart devices allow health care service providers to retrieve and analyze aggregated field evidence and to dynamically adapt their service systems to the patients’ needs (Beverungen et al. 2017c). Rapid development and widespread deployment of smart devices are fundamental to many service innovations (Barrett et al. 2015). However, established smart devices like smartphones and tablets have not yet achieved large-scale adoption in health care. One of the main reasons for this is
* Manuel Wiesche [email protected] Kai Klinker [email protected] Helmut Krcmar [email protected] 1
Chair for Information Systems, Technical University of Munich, Boltzmannstraße 13, 85748 Garching, Germany
that health care workers often need both hands for their work, making it complicated to interact with the device during work (Czuszynski et al. 2015; Mitrasinovic et al. 2015). Augmented Reality (AR) smart glasses, such as the Microsoft HoloLens, are a new generation of smart devices that have the potential to transform health care processes and health care management in general. These AR smart glasses augment their user’s field of view with virtual information (Azuma 1997) and can complement or enhance service processes and workflows at the POC (Niemöller et al. 2017). They can be operated hands-free and do not encumber health care workers during their work while providing access to an information system. Despite this potential, research on smart glasses in the service sector is still at a very early stage (Przybilla et al. 2018). In order to te
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