12/8/2022 Lauren Laws
Inki Kim, Assistant Director of Research in Medical Simulation at the Health Care Engineering Systems Center, created and chaired the first interdisciplinary workshop on XR + AI integration for healthcare applications.
Written by Lauren Laws
Extended reality (XR), such as AR, VR, and MR, has the capability of giving immersive experiences to users, whether it be a teaching tool for doctors, or a method of recovery for patients. But XR has its limits that result in breaking the image of immersion.
What if XR could go one step further? What if it could be 'smarter'? The answer was a first at last month's IEEE/ACM international conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies.
Inki Kim, Assistant Director of Research in Medical Simulation at the Health Care Engineering Systems Center, created and chaired the first interdisciplinary workshop on XR + AI integration for healthcare applications. With co-chair Abigail Wooldridge, assistant professor in Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, their goal was to bring researchers in AR/VR/MR, AI, and healthcare together to share conceptual ideas, problems, methods, technologies, and findings regarding the use of AI and XR together.
"To my knowledge, it was the first workshop that openly discussed opportunities and issues around the integration of XR and AI in healthcare. I was a bit surprised how well this topic was received and resonated among the conference’s steering committees and attendees, and the workshop participants despite a diversity of the research background and domains," said Kim.
As part of the workshop, Kim asked participants to think on and answer two important questions. One: What did they think are the major technological or domain-specific challenge for the integration of XR and AI in healthcare applications? Two: What did they think is an ideal mode of collaboration among stakeholders in medicine, engineering, and science. Six papers were presented and discussed by both in-person and virtual attendees. Teaching Assistant Professor Avinash Gupta both presented one paper and gave closing remarks. Kim said it resulted in both good ideas and networking opportunities.
"As we hoped, the workshop participants and audience came from all different disciplines and background, including medical education, engineering research, AR/VR design, and government agencies (including the NSF and FDA)," said Kim.
Not only did Kim chair a workshop that he hoped would only be the start of collaboration amongst experts, but he also helped the conference steering committee find their keynote speaker, Dean Mark Cohen of the College of Medicine at UIUC. Dean Cohen's speech included a video demo for XR-based medical education that was created by Kim.
The next IEEE/ACM international conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies is scheduled for June 16-23, 2023 in Orlando Florida.