XR-Standards in Health & Care: The Status Quo and the Path ahead of us

Standardisation has important purposes such as cost savings (in manufacturing costs, information costs, transaction costs, shipping costs, distribution costs, switching costs), simplification of work and obtaining aspects of legal certainty. By using standards, manufacturers can focus on the truly innovative aspects of their products. Active participation in the standardisation of virtual reality and augmented reality can also bring significant advantages to companies: on the one hand, they contribute their own interests in this way, and on the other hand they can monitor the market and possible competitors. Active participation from standardisation enables a knowledge advantage and supports market opening strategies. By actively helping to shape the future through standards, companies have a direct influence on their subsequent application. They gain deeper insights into backgrounds and contexts as well as logics related to the standardisation topic. Above all, they benefit from the fact that all standardisation activities in the subject area of the respective committee are communicated transparently to all experts: this gives them the opportunity to contribute via statements and to vote on amendments and proposals to standards and drafts. The networking aspects should not be underestimated either: Active participation results in numerous professional contacts with colleagues from authoritative organisations. So there are numerous arguments in favour of not only using norms, standards and guidelines passively - i.e. by applying them - but actively shaping them oneself.