Surgeries That Would Benefit from Augmented Reality and Their Unified User Interface

Augmented Reality (AR) has a high potential to help healthcare professionals in the operating room and researchers have been working on bringing AR to the operating room for many different types of surgeries so far. However, there are thousands of surgery types that might benefit from the AR. Our goal is to identify which surgeries could benefit the most from AR and identify the common functionality desired in an AR app for surgery and then come up with a unified user interface (UI) design for these surgeries. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the historical number of surgeries performed at a teaching and research hospital to find the most frequently performed surgeries. Starting with the most frequently performed surgeries, we collaborated with the experienced surgeons to find out the surgeries that could benefit from AR the most. For each surgery, we identified the functionality and the information that could be presented on an AR app before, during and after surgery. We prepared the list of surgeries that might benefit from AR through a series of thorough interviews with experienced surgeons. We also identified the functionalities desired in AR apps for surgery and prepared a unified UI design for the common functionality.