Addressing Vicious Cycle of Medical Distress with Augmented Reality: State-of-the-Art Review

Medical distress is a vicious cycle situation for both surgeons and patients and rules a significant negative impact on their quality of life. Surgeons often feel pressure from workload, exhausting operating shifts, yet their learning curve is gradual and empirical. Surgeons under stress perform less efficiently and are prone to make more mistakes during surgery. Moreover, the possibility of burnout among healthcare providers is increasing over the years. On the other side, patients generally have stress and anxiety because of their surgeries and treatment methods. Patients’ surgical anxiety is a stress factor with a potent negative emotion and can even become a permanent phobia. Literature proved that a stressed patient is a cause of surgical complication, which involves surgical outcome, safety, and recovery times. This work highlights the use of augmented reality (AR) for the case of medical distress. This chapter analyzes the operating room (OR) conditions and stress factors both for surgeons and patients in operative and non-operative scenarios and examines current approaches and AR applications for stress management. The results showed that AR-based stress management has the potential to overcome medical distress, improve surgical success, safety, and surgeons’ and patients’ well-being. However, we see that there are fewer studies about user studies and user interface design that has a huge role in the efficiency of these AR applications. In the long run, AR can positively impact society, the healthcare economy, and its efficiency and can provide mutual profit by reducing human errors and enhancing surgical performance and quality.