Surgeon Uses Google Glass to Live-Stream Procedure

With the help of Google Glass and an iPad, a surgeon in the United States has live-streamed a procedure as he performed it in the operating room (OR).

General and trauma surgeon Rafael Grossmann, MD, of Eastern Maine Medical Center (EMMC; Bangor, USA), used the Google Glass wearable computer headset to send a live video stream while he carried out percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG; a simple endoscopic procedure) on a patient who needed a feeding tube fitted. The live video and commentary were sent to and received by an iPad situated nearby. Dr. Grossman also live-streamed the procedure to a Google Glass Hang-out (HO) that he had set up between his Glass and Google accounts beforehand.

The Google Glass was switched on all throughout the procedure, linked up with the HO, and Dr. Grossman recorded himself giving a brief explanation before starting the procedure, talking about the importance of not revealing any identifying or personal information about the patient in either on-line or recorded sessions, and making sure the patient's face was not shown. Dr. Grossman described the event in his blog.

“By performing and documenting this event, I wanted to show that this device and its platform are certainly intuitive tools that have a great potential in Healthcare, and specifically for surgery, could allow better intraoperative consultations, surgical mentoring, and potentiate remote medical education, in a very simple way,” said Dr. Grossman. “The whole thing was fairly quick and went very well. We used 'home-made' techniques, so the pictures and video are not optimal, but I think the point stands: Google Glass streaming during live surgery... by a glass explorer surgeon... is possible.”

Dr. Grossman performed the Google-Glass-assisted procedure on June 20, 2013, just one day earlier than Spanish surgeon Pedro Guillén, MD, head of the traumatology department at the Clínica Cemtro (Madrid, Spain), who carried out a chondrocyte transplant on a 49-year-old man with a cartilage injury while being watched by 150 people all over the world.

Google Glass is a wearable computer equipped with a camera, GPS, bluetooth, microphone, and an optical head-mounted display (OHMD) that sits unobtrusively in the corner of one lens of a pair of glasses. Glass is being developed by Google (Menlo Park, CA, USA), with the mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer. Google Glass displays information in a smartphone-like hands-free format that can interact with the Internet via natural language voice commands.

Related Links:
Dr. Grossman’s blog
Eastern Maine Medical Center
Google Glass