APHS has its first Google Glass App!

I’m really excited to be able to share the news about the first piece of APHS Glassware.  We’ve developed an app to allow pharmacists (or any health professional) to be able to view drug information via Glass!

As anyone who has talked to me about Glass or read my previous posts will be well aware, I believe the ability of Glass to deliver line-of-sight, hands free information to health professionals is a really useful enabler in clinical practice. It was time to stop talking about it and get something happening, and the recent Glass meetup in Canberra at the Inspire Centre at the University of Canberra provided the perfect stimulus.

I met Cecilia Abadie, a well known US based Glass Explorer and the co-creator of fitness Glassware LynxFit at a Wearable Tech conference in LA late last year, and we stayed in touch via the Google + Explorer community. Alex Hayes from the Australian National University has assembled an enormous collection of interviews with Glass Explorers and was instrumental in organising the Glass meet up, which I attended physically and Cecilia attended via Hangout. When Alex and I touched base after the event, it seemed logical that we set the wheels in motion and get on and get something built, and Cecilia and her colleagues were the perfect people to talk to.

We quickly decided to restrict the information to dosage, interactions with other medicines and adverse effects as these are the most common pieces of information accessed frequently by pharmacists. The brief was written, a flow document produced and the proof of concept app delivered, all in the space of a couple of short weeks.

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Initial feedback from the pharmacists who have seen it has been fantastic and, not only do they believe it will genuinely help them in their daily activities, but being able to tangibly see the application has led to an influx of other ideas around how we can use Glass.

We are also talking with Alex and his colleagues at the university around doing some comparative analysis on pharmacists accessing this type of information via Glass, handheld devices and traditional desktops which will assist with our future development activities.

This exercise has been a fantastic illustration of how connections formed utilising both traditional and non-traditional environments can rapidly create opportunities and geographic location raises no barrier to agility and collaboration — all you need is a common ability to recognise the opportunity and act.

This might be the first time the three parties involved have worked together, but I’m pretty confident it’s not going to be last — exciting times ahead!