Use of Smartglasses to Optimize Delivery of Pre-Operative Surgical Safety Checklists

Michael Russo, MD, Ulysses Rosas, BA, Homero Rivas, MD, MBA. Stanford University School of Medicine.

Objective of Technology: Institution of a pre-operative surgical safety checklist for use in timeouts has been widely adopted nationwide in multiple institutions. The benefits of the adoption of preoperative surgical safety checklists have been demonstrated to adhere to life-saving steps and reduce complications. While many hospitals routinely perform pre-operative timeout checklists, few operating teams accomplish them all consistently. The goal of this technology is to further enhance pre-operative surgical safety checklists with augmented reality using novel wearable smart glasses in an effort to further increase compliance and promote improved patient outcomes.

Description of Technology: Smartglasses are a small lightweight wearable computer with an optical head mounted display (OHMD), camera, microphone and headphones. The smartglasses chosen for this study were Glass(TM) by Google (Mountain View, CA). This technology enables the wearer to interact with the device using voice recognition and see data in the corner of their visual field on the display. Unique software was designed to display standard pre-operative surgical safety checklist items and progress through items using voice commands alone.

Conclusions/Future Use: A single-institution IRB approved prospective randomized study is underway. This new technology will be tested intra-operatively at Stanford Hospital and Clinics. Operating room team members will be instructed to perform the pre-operative surgical safety checklist during timeout both with and without the utilization of the augmented reality glasses. Accuracy of the pre-operative surgical safety checklist, completeness of all checklist items, and user satisfaction surveys will all be utilized to determine whether adoption of this new wearable technology is beneficial in the operating room. If effective, this technology could be adopted by other institutions as vehicle to deliver improved care and optimize patient safety.

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