Augmented reality is always more often at the service of medicine and health: we saw projects using the HoloLens headset in USA Universities for studying medicine and anatomy or how the Smart Specs will help legally blind perceiving reality around them; now it seems that we have to give a big welcome to augmented reality in the field of surgery.

Scientific collaborators at Purdue University and the Indiana University School of Medicine have been working together to create a new technology that could help surgeons on battle fields or in isolated areas of the planet operating patients even not being specialists in a certain operation thanks to the help of other medics. Until this moment it was already operative a system with the same aim, but unluckily it had some working problem: in fact, there was a video from the surgeon’s point of view, but the notes were on another display; as you can imagine this was giving some issues since the surgeon had to continuously glance back and forth. Today, instead, with the new STAR (System for Telementoring with Augmented Reality) the situation is decisively better: thanks to augmented reality the specialists’ suggestions will be projected directly on the surgeon’s field of view, making operations safer and faster. Essentially a a transparent display is positioned over the working field, so the surgeon and the specialist have the same view and the first one can read and see the useful information directly on that.

For now the STAR system, developed with the help of Pentagon, has been only tested in laboratories simulating the hospital ambient, but probably it will be soon in full use.

Watch an animation explaining how STAR works: