The Future of Immersive Technology in Global Surgery Education

The second wave of immersive reality technology is required that enhances and exploits current applications, empirical evidence and worldwide interest. If this is successful, low- and middle-income countries will have improved access, less costs and reduced practical limitations. Affordability, availability, accessibility and appropriateness are determinates, and help from several innovative areas can achieve these targets. Artificial intelligence will allow autonomous support of trainees to accelerate their skills when interacting on mobile applications, as deep learning algorithms will generate models that identify data and patterns within them and provide feedback much like a human educator. Future immersive content needs to be high quality, tailored to the learners’ needs and created with minimal time and expenses. The co-creation process involves the integration of learners into the entire development process and a single learning goal can be identified that will have high reusability to surgical students. Sustainability of the material is ensured in the design stage leading to increased cost-effectiveness benefits. One framework has a proven high impact on the co-design of healthcare resources and is discussed. The connectivity of future immersive technology resources has been a major obstacle between regions in their uptake. A handful of collaboration platforms have been created that can deliver immersive content and experiences; the spearhead in this area will be from augmented reality and telesurgery. Opportunity for powerful, large-scale data culture via blockchain collaboration will be an emerging theme that will also drive towards affordability, availability, accessibility and appropriateness in the future global landscape of immersive technology in surgical education.