Telemedicine Meets Augmented Reality: Healthcare Services Delivery and Distance Training

摘要

The socio-economic impact of telemedicine is no longer to be proven; the perceived benefits are for the patients themselves, for the different practitioners and more broadly for the whole healthcare system. These advantages include for instance improving health care delivery for remote and/or underserved patients, helping distant physicians to make the right decision through second medical opinions and reducing overall costs of healthcare system. Hence in that field, providing innovative and pragmatic solutions/tools for healthcare professionals is one of the main objectives. Through this work, we present some telemedicine applications using Augmented Reality. We also discuss different aspects existing in these applications aiming to help both patients and physicians. We emphasize especially, fifteen works published in relevant conferences and journals. Our goal is to show the benefit of putting Telemedicine and Augmented Reality technologies together for both healthcare services delivery and remote training activities. In particular, we highlight interactive, immersive and collaborative aspects for medical distance training, one of the fields where using augmented reality is highly beneficial and very promising.