Part 1

Designing for Google Glass

Lessons learned in augmented cognition, designing for healthcare and thinking beyond screens.

Glass found a new home in the doctor’s office

“Google Glass huh? Is that thing still around?” would be the typical response I would get when I said I design for Glass.

When it was launched to the public Glass was universally panned. Things got so bad we got a new term, Glasshole. But a few years after the glitzy consumer release Glass quietly found a new home — in enterprise.

With Google’s announcement last year, Glass has been making strides in hardware advancements — it’s faster, lighter and more energy efficient. But this piece isn’t about hardware but rather the valuable use cases Glass provides as a device that augments human ability, specifically in healthcare.

In 2017 I joined Augmedix to design for their app that runs on Glass. The company aims to rehumanize healthcare by helping doctors provide better care for their patients.

Here’s an inside peek behind Glass design for healthcare.

Helping doctors provide better care

In US, doctors spend a significant portion of their day documenting patient visits. Previously patient records were stored on paper but now the healthcare mandate requires them to be digitized. Documentation also determines how the doctor and the hospital will be paid. The law incentivizes better health outcomes as opposed to tests for their own sake.

On average doctors spend 2 hours every day documenting patient visits

Ironically documentation itself has become a long and tedious process taking doctors multiple hours a day. Depending on the number of patients, some doctors even come in on the weekend to wrap up this work.

This is where Augmedix comes in. With the help of Glass, a medical remote expert on the other end documents the patient visit. They provide the doctor with relevant patient information helping the doctor save time and be more engaged with the patient.

Glass and augmented reality

Technically Glass is not an augmented reality (AR) device but more of a heads up display. AR is best exemplified by products like the Hololens or the Magic Leap which interact with the viewer’s physical world. For example the Hololens game Fragments tasks the player with solving a crime by hiding clues in their own room.