An industry perspective of challenges and opportunities in medical extended reality technology adoption

Extended reality (XR) technology—including virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality—has long been proposed as the future for the medical industry. However, the risk-adverse nature of the industry contrasts the “fail hard, fail often, fail fast” mantra of Silicon Valley, contributing to slower than anticipated adoption of XR technology in the field. Numerous research efforts have explored specific XR technologies for the medical industry, but research about the people and the companies developing the technology is lacking. We surveyed 40 industry professionals to understand personnel and company demographics, motivations, resources, operations, testing, challenges, and opportunities to improve technology adoption. Companies are challenged with recruiting personnel, from the standard talent pipelines, who have the wide-range and interdisciplinary technical skillsets required to develop XR technology. Hardware and software preferences are continually changing as technology advances and supporting external XR infrastructure remains difficult. Additionally, the technology is still too novel to gain sufficient support from regulatory bodies. Although XR technology remains novel in the medical setting, participants shared that building a business case, developing industry standards, improving user experiences, and an XR industry push rather than a market pull would help drive this adoption. Overall, this study highlighted the complexity of medical XR technology and the challenges to reach ubiquitous XR technology in the medical industry.