Written by Girish Khera on

Apple’s ARKit means Augmented Reality will soon be as common in the medical industry as white coats!

Imagine you are one of the 10% of Americans that are afraid of needles, waiting for a nurse to prick you. Besides the fear of the pain itself, you also worry - What if the nurse cannot find a vein? What if she has to prick me repeatedly? It’s enough to unnerve hardened veterans. Wouldn’t it be nice if it wasn’t such a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey exercise.

Now it can be!

Introducing a device that eases the painful blood collection process by illuminating your veins! Simple and logical isn’t it; make it visible and it’s easier to find.

Sounds sci-fi? It’s just one of the ways in which Augmented reality will change our life.

Apple's new iPhones are bringing Augmented Reality into our hands and that’s a giant leap for the Tech space.

After Pokemon GO took the world by storm, Apple’s Tim Cook’s response was that Apple is “high on AR in the long run.”

A year later, Apple’s new iOS 11 can potentially offer PokemonGO on steroids!

Apple’s ARKit is a new framework for developers to build apps that use augmented reality. The defining feature of ARKit is the ability to create and track a link between the real-world space that the user inhabits, and a virtual space, where you can model visual content; this is the basic requirement of any AR experience.

Augmented Reality isn't a new technology, but as it has started to empower our phones and tablets, the limits to ‘possibilities’ have begun to stretch. With Apple stepping into AR, there are certainly more reasons to get excited.

Where VR replaces everything you see by completely immersing you in another world, AR takes the world around you and adds to it. For Apple, this means viewing through our phone camera, digital objects and information superimposed on the real world.

Augmented Reality in Healthcare: Some Specs

Training and educating the next generation of physicians can be done using applications developed with ARKit. The ARKit framework can be used to create powerful educational applications for the healthcare industry in multiple ways:

Plane detection enables apps to place virtual 3D anatomical models directly on students’ desks, providing a richer and more interactive learning experience than what photographs or videos can offer.

Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) allows students to view 3D models from any angle and from any distance, thereby empowering the interactive sessions.

Ambient lighting ensures 3D models rendered in virtual space are presented at proper brightness to blend into the environment

Seeing a 3D visual of drug mechanism of action, monitoring experiments in the lab, getting hands-on training on medical devices and equipments without actually using them, providing real-time data and assistance during complicated surgical procedures… is only the beginning of Augmented Reality’s wide reaching implications and potential benefits in healthcare. Currently, AR-based physician-oriented medical applications are intended to reduce risks associated with minimally invasive and complex surgeries and improve medical student competence.

Any device running iOS 11 can support ARKit apps. The large, immediately accessible, installed base is a big deal for developers. “Apple has created an empty open field in which we can run around and be creative,” said one swift iOS developer.

ARKit is here to lend significant momentum to mass-market augmented reality experiences. It's a big wake up call to both investors and developers that the technology to support AR experiences is here, and that now is the time to take advantage.

With the technical obstacles almost gone, the only obstacles that remain are related to cultural change and acceptance. The cost-related barriers will also disappear in the future.

By getting AR in the hands of millions of iPhone users, Apple is poised to become the most popular purveyor of augmented reality apps in the world. And by opening up its developers’ kit, it’s powering hundreds of experiments designed to reveal the raison-d’etre of this medium.

Some healthcare applications are obvious, like anatomy training and even live surgical assistance. Others like vein illumination and showing amputees their lost limbs to encourage adoption of prosthetics, is not immediately obvious. Still others are only just taking root in developers’ imaginations.