3-D glasses offer hands-free computing for doctors

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New 3-D smart glasses for doctors

Atheer Labs, a start-up from California, has developed new interactive 3-D glasses to help doctors in and out of the operating room

There’s no shortage of tech companies working on cutting-edge medical innovations and now, one company has developed a new 3-D platform for health care professionals.

Atheer Labs, a start-up company based in Mountain View, Calif., created the program to help doctors and health care professionals in their day-to-day tasks.

“Atheer is building a new form of interactive augmented air glasses- we call it air computing,” Alberto Torres, CEO of Atheer Labs told FoxNews.com. “They are glasses that allow you to see three-dimensional objects in the air that you can interact with through gestures.”

The smart glasses allow doctors to see important information, such as patient vital signs and imaging tests, right over their real-world view.

“Imagine that you are a doctor in an operating room and you are able to bring in all kinds of information about the patient and interact with that information without having to take your gloves off and leave your place,” Torres said.

With Atheer’s technology, doctors would be able to reach out and manipulate a projected 3-D model. For example, a 3-D model of a patient’s heart could be rotated and moved in different directions to help surgeons perform cardiac procedures.

Torres says accessing this data during a surgery could save hospitals money.

“It costs about $1,500 every time a doctor takes their gloves off.  The glasses can certainly eliminate the need to leave the operating room because that information can be available right there without any form of additional screen-- and while you’re still present and seeing the rest of the world,” Torres said.

Real-time video and data sharing will also help physicians share critical advice and instructions to EMT's and other doctors.

“They’re sharing their point of view that can be archived for future reference and monitored by someone who’s giving advice,” Torres said. “I can actually say, ‘Look, why don't you go to that particular area that you’re seeing,’ and that's where you apply pressure.”

Whether hospitals will sign up for wearable computers is still debatable. Reports claim Google no longer plans to release its smart glasses— Google Glass— to the public this year. But Torres believes this new interactive reality can reinvent the way people use computing.

“When you have new forms of technology in a new environment, you end up finding the creativity by putting the tools in the hands of the people who will be using them,” Torres said.

“Once people begin to use this new form of computing, all kinds of things can occur that people didn’t think about— look at what has happened with smartphones for example.  When they were launched people loved the fact that you could do email and a handful of things, but no one ever foresaw all the different applications [it has today.]”

Atheer hopes to release their product by the end of 2015.

For more information on Atheer's smart glass technology, visit Atheerlabs.com.