Research Scientist and Instructor, Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Roger Daglius Dias, MD, PhD, MBA
Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Andrew Eyre, MD, MSHPEd
Medical Director and Attending Emergency Medicine Physician, STRATUS Center for Medical Simulation, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
An Augmented Reality (AR) Smart Decisions Support System to Advance Trauma Care at the Point of Injury
Despite advancements in trauma care, errors in prehospital treatment are common, resulting in poor patient outcomes. Telemedicine has emerged as a promising tool for delivering care in prehospital settings and has been shown to improve the quality of care provided. However, conventional telemedicine tools have significant limitations when it comes to delivering real-time support and guidance to providers in point-of-injury (POI) settings, where rapid response and informed decision-making are crucial. Moreover, POI settings often require specialized equipment and expertise, which may not be available in conventional telemedicine setups.
With Stepping Strong Center funding, Ryan Harari, PhD, and his team plan to develop and test an augmented reality (AR)-based telemonitoring support system, which will aid real-time decision-making and procedural guidance to healthcare providers in challenging online and offline POI settings. The team will leverage the AR-Coach system, which was developed in previous NASA-supported projects, to create an AR telemonitoring system. By incorporating both online telemonitoring for real-time support and an offline interactive checklist based on best practices, the team aims to improve clinical practices in trauma care in civilian and military applications, leading to less death, and reducing the cost burdens on healthcare systems.
Ryan Harari, PhD, is a research scientist and faculty member at the Department of Emergency Medicine and STRATUS Medical Simulation Center at Mass General Brigham, and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Harari holds a PhD in Systems Engineering and has an extensive background in Computer Sciences and Human Factors and Cognitive Engineering. After finishing his PhD program, Harari completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Emergency Medicine at Mass General Brigham. His research focuses on developing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) support systems leveraging machine learning and wearable sensors to establish safer interactions between humans and semi-automated agents, such as surgical robots. Dr. Harari’s research has been supported by NASA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Defense (DoD.)