Liz Gannes writes:

Here’s a Google Glass use that’s hard to argue with: An emergency room doctor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard teaching hospital in Boston, Mass., was tending to a patient suffering from massive brain bleeding. Because the doctor was wearing Google Glass, he was able to see that the patient had severe allergic reactions to blood pressure medications. Normally that might have required running to a computer or grabbing a tablet, accessing the patient records and then scrubbing up again.

“Google Glass enabled me to view this patient’s allergy information and current medication regimen without having to excuse myself to log in to a computer, or even lose eye contact,” said Dr. Steve Horng.

Because he was able to start treatment immediately with that knowledge, Horng believes that Google Glass helped save the patient from the chance of permanent disability or death.

Horng is part of a pilot program at Beth Israel involving about five doctors using Google Glass. This isn’t the normal Glass you can buy if you’re selected for Google’s “Explorers” program and pay $1,500. It’s a version of the same hardware that has been modified by a company called Wearable Intelligence.

Wearable Intelligence strips and replaces the Google Glass software with a reformatted version of Android, so it can be locked down for specific uses and specific contexts. Doctors don’t have the option to tweet photos of patients, check their Facebook, or even take the device off the hospital Wi-Fi network. Google’s on-board speech recognition technology is replaced with a more specialized medical dictionary from Nuance.

I agree, this is a great use for Google Glass. See the videos below for more.

And one step closer to the singularity.

Here are a couple of videos (the first includes actors playing the patients) that show how this works. Even if you hate-hate-hate Google Glass as used by regular people in public, you may be able to see the appeal here: