What display settings reduce strain during telemedicine?

Long telemedicine sessions leave your eyes feeling dry, tired, and strained. This daily discomfort makes it hard to focus on your patients, turning virtual care into a frustrating experience.

Settings that reduce eye strain include matching the monitor’s brightness to the room’s ambient light, using a warmer color temperature, ensuring a high refresh rate to eliminate flicker, and maintaining a balanced contrast ratio for clear text.

The shift to telemedicine has brought healthcare into our homes, but it has also dramatically increased the amount of time clinicians spend staring at screens. Unlike casual computer use, a telemedicine consultation¹ demands sustained visual focus. Eye strain, headaches, and general fatigue are common complaints that can impact a doctor’s performance and well-being. The good news is that you can significantly reduce this strain by optimizing your monitor’s display settings. These adjustments are not about personal preference; they are about creating a visual environment that works with your eyes, not against them. This article will explore the most important settings and explain how to configure them for maximum comfort.

Why Is Proper Brightness Adjustment Important for Telemedicine Sessions?

Your monitor feels like a spotlight in a dim room, or it is too dull to see clearly. This constant mismatch forces your eyes to work overtime, causing headaches and fatigue.

Proper brightness is important because it minimizes the strain on your eyes. Matching the screen’s brightness to the light in your room prevents your pupils from constantly adjusting between a bright screen and darker surroundings.

Your eye’s pupil expands and contracts to regulate the amount of light it receives. When your monitor is much brighter than your room, your pupils constrict when you look at the screen and expand when you look away. This constant adjustment, repeated hundreds of times throughout the day, is a primary cause of eye strain². The goal is to create a seamless visual field where the monitor’s brightness blends with your environment. A simple way to achieve this is to display a mostly white document on your screen and hold a white piece of paper next to it. Adjust your monitor’s brightness until its white level matches the paper’s illumination. It should not look like a light source, but rather another surface in the room. Professional displays like our MD32C 3MP Diagnostic Monitor provide precise brightness controls³, allowing you to find this perfect balance for sustained comfort during long consultations.

Recommended Brightness for Different Environments

How Does Color Temperature Affect Visual Comfort?

Staring at a harsh, blue-tinted screen all day feels sterile and fatiguing. This intense light can leave your eyes feeling tired and may even make it harder to wind down after work.

A warmer color temperature reduces the amount of high-energy blue light reaching your eyes. This can lessen visual fatigue during the day and help prevent the disruption of your natural sleep cycle in the evening.

Color temperature describes the color of light and is measured in Kelvin (K). Lower Kelvin values produce a warmer, yellowish light, while higher values produce a cooler, bluish light. Most standard monitors are set to a very cool temperature (6500K or higher) to make whites appear bright and crisp. However, this high concentration of blue light is known to cause eye strain for many people. More importantly, exposure to blue light⁴, especially in the evening, can suppress the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep. For better visual comfort, we recommend adjusting your monitor to a warmer setting, typically between 4000K and 5000K. This creates a softer, more natural light that is easier on the eyes for prolonged periods. Our MD26C 24" Diagnostic Monitor offers customizable color temperature settings, allowing clinicians to select a profile that maximizes their comfort without sacrificing the color accuracy needed for clinical review.

Can Refresh Rate Impact Fatigue During Long Consultations?

You do not see it, but your monitor’s screen is constantly flashing. This invisible flicker makes your eye muscles work nonstop, leading to a feeling of strain you cannot quite explain.

Yes, a higher refresh rate creates a more stable image with less imperceptible flicker. This reduces the subconscious work your eye muscles must do to track content, resulting in significantly less fatigue during long sessions.

A monitor’s refresh rate, measured in Hertz (Hz), is the number of times per second the image on the screen is redrawn. A standard 60Hz monitor redraws the image 60 times per second. While this is fast enough to create the illusion of motion, it can produce a subtle flicker that your brain and eye muscles still register. This is especially true on monitors that use a technique called Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) to control brightness, which can enhance the perception of flicker at lower brightness settings. A monitor with a higher refresh rate⁵ (75Hz, 100Hz, or more) and flicker-free backlight technology⁶ provides a more solid and stable image. This stability means your eyes do not have to make constant, tiny adjustments to process the image, which can dramatically reduce strain over a full day of consultations. The MD45C Dual-screen Diagnostic Monitor is engineered with a stable, high-quality panel to ensure a flicker-free experience, which is essential when managing patient video and electronic health records simultaneously.

Refresh Rate and Its Impact on Visual Comfort

What Role Does Contrast Ratio Play in Reducing Eye Strain?

Reading text on your screen feels like a chore. The letters seem to bleed into the background, forcing you to squint to make out patient notes or lab results, causing headaches.

A balanced contrast ratio makes text and images sharp and legible without being harsh. This reduces the effort your eyes must expend to focus, which is critical for reading extensive medical records or reports without discomfort.

Contrast ratio is the difference between the brightest white and the darkest black a monitor can produce. When the contrast is too low, whites appear grayish and blacks look washed out. This makes text difficult to read and forces your eyes to work harder to distinguish shapes and letters. Conversely, when the contrast is set too high, whites can become overwhelmingly bright and cause "blooming," where bright areas spill over into dark ones, making text appear jagged and harsh. The goal is to find an optimal balance that provides crisp, clear text without causing glare. A high-quality medical display⁷ is designed to deliver a deep, true black and a clean, controlled white. This ensures that text remains highly legible even at a comfortable brightness level. The MD120C 12MP High-Precision Diagnostic Monitor, with its advanced panel technology, provides an exceptionally high contrast ratio⁸, ensuring that every detail in an image or document is presented with absolute clarity, reducing the cognitive load and strain associated with reading.

How Does Reshin Optimize Display Settings for Telemedicine?

You need a monitor that works for you, not against you. Fiddling with confusing settings is the last thing you want to do when you have patients waiting in your virtual lobby.

We optimize our displays for telemedicine by engineering them with built-in flicker-free technology, user-friendly presets for brightness and color, and high-contrast panels. These features are designed to deliver long-term visual comfort right out of the box.

We design our monitors with the understanding that a clinician’s primary focus should be on the patient, not on the technology. Our approach to reducing eye strain is built directly into our hardware and software. We use flicker-free backlight technology⁹ with DC dimming, which eliminates the invisible flicker that causes fatigue. Our monitors include pre-calibrated viewing modes, such as a "Reading Mode" that automatically adjusts brightness and warms the color temperature for text-heavy work. We also include easily accessible controls so you can fine-tune settings to match your specific environment and preference. The physical design is also crucial; our stands offer full ergonomic adjustment¹⁰, allowing you to position the screen at the perfect height and angle to prevent neck and shoulder strain. Our ultra-wide models, like the MD51CHY 34" 5MP Diagnostic Monitor, are perfect for telemedicine, allowing you to view a patient’s video feed and their chart side-by-side without constant window switching, further streamlining your workflow and reducing strain.

Conclusion

Optimizing your display settings is critical for comfortable telemedicine. By adjusting brightness, color, and contrast, and by using a flicker-free monitor, you can significantly reduce eye strain and improve your focus. To explore flicker-free medical displays designed for telemedicine, contact Reshin at martin@reshinmonitors.com.