{"id":698,"date":"2018-05-09T17:36:25","date_gmt":"2018-05-09T21:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-ca\/industry\/blog\/industry\/2018\/05\/09\/trends-driving-change-in-mixed-reality-for-healthcare\/"},"modified":"2018-05-09T17:36:25","modified_gmt":"2018-05-09T21:36:25","slug":"trends-driving-change-in-mixed-reality-for-healthcare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-ca\/industry\/blog\/health\/2018\/05\/09\/trends-driving-change-in-mixed-reality-for-healthcare\/","title":{"rendered":"Trends Driving Change in Mixed Reality for Healthcare"},"content":{"rendered":"
Mixed reality continues to be a disruptive force in healthcare with examples ranging from the abolishment of cadavers in medical student training to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) immersion therapy for patients and pre-operative visualization of brain tumors overlaid with diagnostics.<\/p>\n
Looking forward, what will be some of the most important areas of growth, evolution and innovation for Mixed Reality in healthcare? Where will be the areas to invest energy and resources to take advantage of these technology growth areas? Here are 4 areas that I think will lead shifts in the way we create change with mixed realities.<\/p>\n
Trend #1: Augmented Reality + Virtual Reality<\/strong><\/p>\n Battles will fade as people embrace the entire spectrum of realities. These technologies do not need to be mutually exclusive because they can be complementary since one size fits all is rarely the case. This also means scenarios will bridge across form factors, igniting experiences and collaboration on platforms vs hardware alone. Some things we may expect to see:<\/p>\n Trend #2: Mixed Reality + Artificial Intelligence<\/strong><\/p>\n Mixed Reality and Artificial Intelligence are driving fundamental shifts that are redefining the future of computing. Together, Mixed Reality and Artificial Intelligence will continue to enable experiences where our interactions with people, places and things will evolve. Here are some ways I think we will see this evolve:<\/p>\n Vision <\/strong>\u2013 We may see assisted identification, understanding and labelling of the things we are working on (in plain view) – organs, tools, people – assisting us at navigating our work<\/p>\n Speech –<\/strong> We may see this enable those with hearing impairment to more easily engage with the world around them, converting spoken audio to text in real time<\/p>\n Language <\/strong>\u2013 We may use natural language processing to enable real-time audio translations between patients and caregivers who speak in different native tongue<\/p>\n Trend #3: Immersive Communication<\/strong><\/p>\n Immersive communication will let us have real-time and photo realistic holograms of the people we are speaking with. Immersive communication will enhance our ability to achieve digital presence. It will bring distant people together in more meaningful ways than ever before\u00a0– connecting healthcare practitioners to remote patients or families to distant loved ones. Communication becomes more natural when we are speaking to a photo realistic hologram of someone in real time. Take a look at some work Microsoft Research has been doing in this area:<\/p>\n\n