The BLA team had the opportunity to work with a leading healthcare entity to design and build a proof of concept using Vuzix smart glasses. The use case centered on providing additional support to healthcare professionals interacting with patients. The requirements and workflow chosen were a great fit for the unique attributes of smart glasses versus cell phones and other mobile devices. Ability to focus, hands free, and sharing real world information with others were key pluses for the glasses in this case.
It was a great opportunity to apply our core skills in UI/UX design and Android development in a whole new domain. Below the team discusses the project and the new challenges faced in working with smart glasses technology.
1. User Interface - touchpad vs. voice
One of the challenges was optimizing the control of the app through the glasses — which is typically done with a trackpad on the side of the glasses or with speech-to-text. However, this method was not reliable as the user is often wearing a suit with protective gloves and cannot use the trackpad on the side. So we deployed voice recognition as well, as a fall back, which required a slightly modified design and some tweaking of the voice recognition library to adopt some of the custom medical terms.
2. User interface - screen size
Another challenge was the size of the screen. It has a resolution of 640 x 360 — which is not very big at all — and it is directly in front of the eye of the user so needs to be as unobtrusive as possible. This called for a smarter and more compact design with the use of a black background to avoid eye fatigue. We found that Google’s design guide for glass (https://developers.google.com/glass-enterprise) had some good hints like full-screen, white text etc. Of course, using the recommended design approach from Google / Android made the development process smoother as well.
3. Android Variations
The glasses make use of an Android platform, which was a huge advantage for us given our experience in developing Android apps; however, there are several variations which added complexity. The speech-to-text functionality uses a custom speech recognition library which is different from the one used for phone-based Android apps. Additionally, the app is deployed through a custom store maintained by Vuzix which has its own workflow — especially related to beta distributions which we had to work around. Finally, each glasses model has their own SDK version. For example the Vuzix Blades use a relatively old SDK version, number 6.0 while the newer versions have more up to date operating systems.
For sure, the glasses required some changes to our way of working, but it was worth it. Now that we have been through the process the next project will be even smoother. By having the hands free and being able to communicate by voice it is possible to have a more integrated experience. Perhaps in the future we can combine this customized UI experience with other technologies like AI to provide as big an improvement in patient care as possible.