Two-way Augmented Reality Co-location Under Telemedicine Context

The medical care responsibilities are often on the shoulders of nonprofessionals such as captains who are equipped with forty hours of designated training every five years. However, this training is neither enough for the captains to handle medical incidents nor releases their stress during the treatment. Currently, captains have very limited support from a medical expert, only via phone call or email from the Radio Medical Services. Thus, the authors explored that how the two-way augmented reality (AR) can support the collaboration between captains and doctors for a better quality of care. A Human-Centred Design approach is applied in this study, including field study and user testing. The lean user experience method was applied with fast prototyping-testing loops. The main findings are AR played an essential role to boost confidence on the captain's side, and the real value of AR is in supporting medical skills like suturing and abdominal searching. This study serves as a pilot research, thus it was limited by small sample size and qualitative method. Improving the communication between the captains and doctors is key for future studies.