Andrews Anya
Department of Internal Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, United States.
JMIR Form Res. 2022 Apr 21;6(4):e18222. doi: 10.2196/18222.
Augmented reality (AR) and brain-computer interface (BCI) are promising technologies that have a tremendous potential to revolutionize health care. While there has been a growing interest in these technologies for medical applications in the recent years, the combined use of AR and BCI remains a fairly unexplored area that offers significant opportunities for improving health care professional education and clinical practice. This paper describes a recent study to explore the integration of AR and BCI technologies for health care applications.
The described effort aims to advance an understanding of how AR and BCI technologies can effectively work together to transform modern health care practice by providing new mechanisms to improve patient and provider learning, communication, and shared decision-making.
The study methods included an environmental scan of AR and BCI technologies currently used in health care, a use case analysis for a combined AR-BCI capability, and development of an integrated AR-BCI prototype solution for health care applications.
The study resulted in a novel interface technology solution that enables interoperability between consumer-grade wearable AR and BCI devices and provides the users with an ability to control digital objects in augmented reality using neural commands. The article discusses this novel solution within the context of practical digital health use cases developed during the course of the study where the combined AR and BCI technologies are anticipated to produce the most impact.
As one of the pioneering efforts in the area of AR and BCI integration, the study presents a practical implementation pathway for AR-BCI integration and provides directions for future research and innovation in this area.
增强现实（AR）和脑机接口（BCI）是很有前景的技术，具有彻底改变医疗保健行业的巨大潜力。尽管近年来人们对这些技术在医疗应用方面的兴趣与日俱增，但AR和BCI的联合使用仍是一个相当未被探索的领域，为改善医疗保健专业教育和临床实践提供了重大机遇。本文描述了一项近期的研究，以探索AR和BCI技术在医疗保健应用中的整合。
所描述的工作旨在增进对AR和BCI技术如何通过提供改善患者和医疗服务提供者学习、沟通及共同决策的新机制，有效协同作用以转变现代医疗保健实践的理解。
研究方法包括对当前医疗保健中使用的AR和BCI技术进行环境扫描、对AR - BCI组合功能进行用例分析，以及为医疗保健应用开发集成的AR - BCI原型解决方案。
该研究产生了一种新颖的接口技术解决方案，实现了消费级可穿戴AR设备和BCI设备之间的互操作性，并为用户提供了使用神经指令在增强现实中控制数字对象的能力。本文在研究过程中开发的实际数字健康用例的背景下讨论了这种新颖的解决方案，预计在这些用例中AR和BCI技术的结合将产生最大影响。
作为AR和BCI集成领域的开创性努力之一，该研究提出了AR - BCI集成的实际实施途径，并为该领域未来的研究和创新提供了方向。
