Some Usability Issues of Augmented and Mixed Reality for e-Health Applications in the Medical Domain
Augmented and Mixed Reality technology provides to the medical field the possibility for seamless visualization of text-based physiological data and various graphical 3D data onto the patient’s body. This allows improvements in diagnosis and treatment of
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Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, LS6 3QS, United Kingdom Innovation North – Faculty for Information and Technology [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] 3 Medical University Graz, 8036 Graz, Austria Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics & Documentation (IMI) Research Unit HCI4MED [email protected]
Abstract. Augmented and Mixed Reality technology provides to the medical field the possibility for seamless visualization of text-based physiological data and various graphical 3D data onto the patient’s body. This allows improvements in diagnosis and treatment of patients. For the patient, this technology offers benefits and further potential in therapy, rehabilitation and diagnosis, and explanation. Applications across the whole range of functions that affect the health sector from the physician, the medical student, to the patients are possible. However, the quality of the work of medical professionals is considerably influenced by both usefulness and usability of technology. Consequently, key issues in developing such applications are the tracking methodology, the display technology and most of all ensuring good usability. There have been several research groups who extended the state of the art in employing these technologies in the medical domain. However, only a few are addressing issues of Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, and Usability Engineering. This paper provides a brief overview over the history and the most recent developments in this domain with a special focus on issues of user-centered development. Keywords: Human–Computer Interaction, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Visualization, User-Centered Development, e-Health, Medicine.
1 Introduction The concept of Mixed and Augmented Reality provides the fusion of digital data with the human perception of the environment: using computer-based rendition techniques (graphics, audio, and other senses) the computing system renders data so that the resulting rendition appears to the user as being a part of the perceived environment. Most applications of this paradigm have been developed for the visual sense, using A. Holzinger (Ed.): USAB 2007, LNCS 4799, pp. 255–266, 2007. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
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computer graphics technology to render 3D objects and presenting them registered to the real world. The difference between Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) is in the degree of virtualization: in AR the real world is the main operating framework, with a limited number of virtual objects added into the display, hereby solely augmenting the real-world view of the user. In MR, the emphasis of the virtual environment is much larger, which can manifest itself either in a larger number of virtual objects or in having the virtual environment (VE) as the dominant interaction framework. Both paradigms have interesting applications in the medical domain: AR can be used to visualize complex 3D medical data sets (e.g. form ultrasound or
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