Google's new Google Glass, a new wearable headset with a screen that is controlled by voice commands and a track pad, was used recently by Dr. Rafael Grossmann, of the Eastern Maine Medical Center to perform the first Google Glass surgery, according to PC Mag.
Grossmann took to his blog to discuss his surgical experience with Google Glass in a post entitled, "'Ok Glass, Hand Me the Scalpel Please...' GoogleGlass During Surgery!," and included a video of him in the OR using the Glass. He used Google Glass along with Google Glass Hangout, the device's sharing app.
"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 intra-operative consultations, surgical mentoring and potentiate remote medical education, in a very simple way," he wrote.
"The patient involved needed a feeding tube (Gastrostomy) and we chose to placed it endoscopically, with a procedure called PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy. You can Google that to learn more...). Being the first time, I wanted to do this during a simple and commonly performed procedure, to make sure that my full attention was not diverted from taking excellent care of the patient."
Grossmann noted that the use of Google Glass during the surgery took place with the patient's consent, and he made sure that their privacy was mantained as no identifying patient information was recorded or transmitted during the procedure.
"I was able to show not just the patient's abdomen, but also the endoscopic view, in a very clever, simple and inexpensive way. I think that there should be ways to directly stream the endoscopic view thru Google Glass (My friend @Julianmb, also a Google Explorer, and his team of experts from @Droiders are working on that!) but this was a "Poor's Man's" set up," Grossmann wrote.
Google Glass will be officially available late this year or in early 2014, according to T3.
