Health Data Management for Nursing Practice: An Intelligent, Holographic Mixed-Reality System

Abstract

The elderly population in need of long-term care is rising, adding to the workload of healthcare workers in nursing homes. Throughout a work day health workers often must perform the time consuming process of collecting various types of health data from the residents. A recent study has revealed that frontline nurses and caregivers spend over half of their time accessing and updating patient records instead of providing care. New technology could enhance these data-oriented operations, and free up time so that staff can care for patients in other ways. Intelligent human-computer interaction paradigms can enhance data retrieval, visualization, and communication processes efficiently in a way to improve the overall productivity during work. In this study, we present an intelligent holographic mixed reality (MR) system that leverages Microsoft Hololens for work practices of healthcare work in nursing homes. Supported by computer vision, this system provides automatic data retrieval, in addition to interactive data visualization and mid-air data entry mechanism. Using face recognition through the Hololens’ visual sensors, the system recognizes individual patients, and automatically retrieves relevant health data and supports data entry.