Cisco Spark Board Uses VR, Collaboration To Aid Doctors In Critical Medical Decisions

Cisco is pairing together its revolutionary Spark Board product with virtual reality to make medical teams more efficient and move faster when solving critical patient issues.

At Cisco Live 2017 in Las Vegas this week, the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant gave CRN a demo of a health care use case around how physicians can collaborate using the Spark Board product, Cisco software and virtual reality gear.

Sean Caragata, director of business development for Cisco engineering, said the company's interactive Spark Board capabilities allow physicians to seamlessly share images and documents from remote locations in real-time, enabling faster collaboration and diagnostic conclusions.

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"[Physicians] are able to search through different medical images that have been digitally added to the Spark Room. He's able to annotate them and then drop those images into a Spark Group where other physicians are able to review the images in real-time, and they're able to make their own annotations," said Caragata. "That will allow them to collaborate more quickly and to reach conclusions more quickly."

In this particular demo, Caragata said a group of physicians are discussing a complex cancer case.

"[It] allows physicians to participate … who were not there for the actual session – so if they're from another time zone or another location," he said.

Spark Board, unveiled earlier this year, allows anyone with the Cisco Spark app to draw on or mark in real time on the interactive whiteboard simultaneously, even from a remote mobile phone. Participants can draw on a black canvas or any document, and team members can edit at the same time.

No microphones are needed for the Spark Board or a network, as the product automatically connects to any laptop, PC, Mac or mobile device. Other features include voice-tracking technology and a 4K ultra-high-definition camera.