Jake Hobbs (he/him)

I am a fourth-year PhD student at Open Lab, Newcastle University, researching the impact of augmented reality (AR) on medical imaging workflows. My work explores how AR can be integrated with existing technologies to enhance efficiency, support clinical decision-making, and improve medical training. In the first year of my PhD, I interviewed surgeons and radiologists across the North East to understand current practices and identify opportunities for meaningful AR integration. The paper detailing this study was published in the JMIR XR and Spatial Computing journal in August 2025. Since then, I have expanded this research to include both clinical applications and training contexts, running interviews and workshops with stakeholders to uncover technological limitations and opportunities for adoption.

To support this, I conducted a scoping literature review inspired by the needs of medical applications, particularly the perceptual challenges of head-mounted displays. While motivated by healthcare, the insights from this review extend well beyond medicine, offering guidance for the design and integration of AR across a range of fields. This review was published in the MDPI Informatics journal in August 2025.

I hold a BSc in Computer Science from Newcastle University, where my final dissertation focused on the development process of digital twins, including the development of a digital twin of an F1Tenth car as a case study. Before starting my PhD, I completed a summer placement with the EPiC (Educational Practices in Computing) research group, where I developed a command-line interface simulator to support student learning in a safe, interactive environment. This experience allowed me to deepen my knowledge of interface design, command-line systems, and project management.