鈥淪O, WHY are you wearing Google Glass?鈥� I ask the man ahead of me in the coffee line at Ubicomp, a computing conference in Zurich, Switzerland. He responds enthusiastically that he is trying to work out how people with diabetes could use Glass鈥檚 camera to recognise the nutritional value of the food they eat and use that to predict their glucose levels, helping them better cope with their condition.
The wearer is Subrai Pai of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and his idea is just one of many healthcare applications for Glass. The camera-packing wireless eyepiece is also helping people to live with some of the problems of paralysis, blindness and deafness. And surgeons are eyeing Glass as a tool for improving surgery and medical education.
鈥淭he headset is helping people to live with some of the problems of paralysis, blindness and deafness鈥�
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Last month, Christopher Kaeding, a surgeon at Ohio State University in Columbus, to repair a patient鈥檚 anterior cruciate ligament. As he went through the procedure, colleagues across town were able to view the action from Kaeding鈥檚 point of view 鈥� by virtue of a Google Hangouts online forum 鈥� and offer advice, while medical students in yet another location watched and learned.
鈥淎 surgeon can wear Glass while operating, allowing medical students to watch and learn remotely鈥�
Beyond the operating theatre, Glass could be useful to people with sensory impairments. A blind person preparing to cook and wondering what鈥檚 in a food tin could easily find out by taking a picture of the label and sending it, with a question, to crowd workers on Amazon鈥檚 Mechanical Turk using a system developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.
鈥淏ack comes a result in seconds saying 鈥榥o, the can does not contain nuts鈥�. Or 鈥榝lip the box around, you鈥檙e looking at the wrong side鈥�,鈥� says Thad Starner, of Georgia Tech, who is Google鈥檚 technical lead for Glass. 鈥淭his technology also helps with things you just don鈥檛 even think about as a sighted person, like is there a rash on my baby鈥檚 head?鈥�
Starner is also working with people with paralysis of all four limbs to see how Glass can help them. For instance, Glass makes a sound that is conducted through your cheekbone to signal the arrival of a text or email, which can be sent from your phone via Bluetooth or over Wi-Fi. A tilt of the user鈥檚 head, or a wink, tells Glass鈥檚 sensors to display the message. 鈥淭hey can then respond by voice and their words are sent to Google servers, converted to text and transmitted as SMS faster than their friends can text,鈥� says Starner.
Starner tells of a quadriplegic woman who has been empowered by Glass to act as navigator and videographer on camping trips with friends 鈥� using Glass鈥檚 heads-up, turn-by-turn satnav and its built-in camera. 鈥淕lass is reducing some of the barriers to such participation,鈥� he says.
The aim of Pai鈥檚 project is to let people with diabetes view all of their health data in a simple Glass visualisation. 鈥淭his could include data from insulin pumps, continuous glucose monitors, pedometers, heart-rate monitors and nutrition information from a food journal captured via Glass鈥檚 camera,鈥� says Pai鈥檚 colleague Nate Heintzman, who runs the project at the University of California, San Diego. He admits that the system is not yet ready to perform automated food-recognition but says that simply having data in one place will help users make better health decisions.
The benefits extend to more than just those who live with impairments. For parents learning to communicate with deaf children, Georgia Tech researcher Kim Xu has developed SmartSign, an app demonstrated by Starner at Ubicomp, that allows a child鈥檚 hearing family to ask for the sign language of a particular word and have a short video 鈥渕icrolesson鈥� on that subject streamed to the Glass screen.
Google is not saying when Glass will become an affordable consumer product, but when it does, a raft of health applications await it. Sensors that measure heart arrhythmias are already being built into clothing by researchers like Lucy Dunne, a smart-textiles designer at the University of Minnesota in St Paul. It is likely that Glass will connect with such sensors to record and display their data.
Despite the technical wizardry, the trickiest problem Google faces, says Dunne, is the same one that faces makers of all wearable technologies: making Glass into something that people actually want to wear. That will mean making Glass look a lot more attractive than its current uber-geeky look. 鈥淧eople want to look normal. So you have to innovate within subtle conformity restraints and aesthetics,鈥� she says. 鈥淔ashion is hard.鈥�
The Glass 2.0 wish list
Google Glass has a mic and camera, plus sensors for motion, orientation, proximity and eye winks, but a few more gizmos would really up its game.
So says Bernard Kress of GoogleX, the lab in Mountain View, California, where Glass is being developed. Top of his wish list is adding a Kinect-style depth camera to allow Glass to recognise its wearer鈥檚 gestures, such as finger clicks and hand waves, to activate functions like sharing pictures quickly online. But he says he is still waiting for depth cameras to miniaturise enough.
Meanwhile, Japanese mobile network NTT DoCoMo has developed a way that a Glass-type headset could capture your face for video calls. Using four tiny fisheye video-camera lenses aimed at a user鈥檚 face from the headset鈥檚 edges, four distorted images of your face can be captured, corrected and stitched together to create a full-motion selfie to be transmitted with your voice.
Kai Kunze at Osaka Prefecture University in Japan hopes Glass 2.0 comes with a gaze-tracking sensor. He has created an algorithm that logs your reading habits by watching for eye-movement patterns that differ when reading comics, newspapers, fashion magazines, textbooks or novels. It tots up your intake and warns you if you read too much junk.
