3D Telemedicine: A Clinician Feedback Study

Overview

The use of Telemedicine has increased significantly due to constraints imposed by the Covid pandemic. 3D telemedicine uses multiple cameras in the clinic room which can reconstruct an image in 3 dimensions in real-time, which may be beneficial in more visual focused specialties such as Plastic Surgery. There are no clinical data regarding the use of 3D telemedicine, with previous studies laboratory based without clinicians or patients. This study aims to provide clinician data comparing 3D and 2D Telemedicine, and feedback to allow incremental improvement of the system prior to clinical trials involving patients.

Aims The aim of this study is to assess 3D telemedicine and 2D telemedicine from the clinician's perspective, to optimise the system prior to clinical trials with patients. This will provide baseline validated outcome data on areas such as usability, presence (the realism or immersion of a system), mental effort and task load. "Keep, Lose and Change" prompts will be used to aid improvements in the 3D Telemedicine system prior to clinical trials. Participants This will be a clinician feedback based study on 2D telemedicine and 3D telemedicine. Clinicians will include nurses, doctors and physiotherapists from Canniesburn Plastic Surgery Unit, Glasgow, UK. Consent Clinicians will consent in writing to participate Method Clinicians will use both 3D and 2D Telemedicine systems to examine a member of the research team who will act as a "patient". There will be a single clinician (consultant, nurse specialist or physiotherapist) examining the patient during the clinic.They will use each system for 10 minutes each. No randomisation will take place. This will be followed by a questionnaire which will be filled in once per patient by the clinician in the clinic. Outcome measures No primary or secondary measures are specified as this is an observational feedback study, not an interventional clinical trial. Satisfaction - Visual Analogue Scale 0-100 Mental Effort Rating Scale - single instrument Likert scale (Paas 1996) System Usability Scale - 10 item industry standard technology scale Presence Questionnaire - 29 item scale - assessment of presence in the system/virtual environment (PQ, Witmer 2005). Semi Structured exit interview - will discuss with participant their views on the telemedicine system, using "Keep, Lose and Change" prompts to aid system improvements.