Designing Wearable Personal Assistants for Surgeons: An Egocentric Approach

The design of general-purpose wearable computers demands particular care for how human perception, cognition, and action work and work together. The authors propose a human body-and-mind centric (egocentric as opposed to device-centric) design framework and present initial findings from deploying it in the design of a wearable personal assistant (WPA) for orthopedic surgeons. The result is a Google Glass-based prototype system aimed at facilitating touchless interaction with x-ray images, browsing of electronic patient records (EPR) when on the move, and synchronized ad hoc remote collaboration. This article is part of a special issue on digitally enhanced reality.