Abstract:

In this paper we will introduce the HeARt, a mobile learning system to support university medical students in their learning activities during an anatomy laboratory.

The widespread diffusion of mobile technologies in today’s society and the technological developments of recent years offers new opportunities for learning providing innovative techniques and tools in education. In this paper, the potentiality of mobile augmented reality in medical learning context will be investigated.

In particular, we propose an educational system based on the Augmented Reality in order to enable users to enrich the human heart models with virtual content using mobile computing. Students usually use, in their daily anatomy laboratory, a physical human heart model to investigate and learn about heart anatomy. Even though these models are perfect education tools to observe details and touch "with hands" all the heart sections, they need a supplementary encyclopaedia to learn all heart details. In literature there are several examples of Virtual Reality models and systems developed to learn on human heart anatomy in all its details and sections, moreover, some of them are an excellent reproduction.

However, such of these educational support does not address one of a very important aspect of learning anatomy: the manipulation of reality. Our system, using the Augmented Reality technology, will provide in the same time some educational visually connected to the physical organ, giving the opportunity to manipulate the physical human heart model or, with some adaptation, to a real organ.

More in depth, the system we have designed consists of two modules: a content designer and a mobile augmented reality interface. The content designer module will be used to acquire, with a 3D scanner system, the virtual representation of the physical organ model (or real organ) in 3D coordinates. Therefore, the professor, using a modelling software like Blender, will tag the education contents on the 3D model of the organ. These "education tags" are saved in a database that will be used in the mobile application to teach anatomy to the students.

The second module of our system is the user interface, a mobile augmented reality application. Because our interest was focused on how augmented reality will support learning with mobile devices in medical classes, and also considering that it is very hard to find any consumers AR glasses in the market, we felt that today a design for mobile devices like iPad was most appropriate. For this to happen, we have developed the user interface using latest Augmented Reality technologies available for AR developers. In particular, the application will benefit from using the just-released Apple ARKit API and Core Machine Learning API to develop an app that the students will use in their daily laboratory activities. The app, using the Machine Learning API, will recognize by a visual tag a specific organ (like a heart), then the AR layer will be used to show over the physical model the didactical contents loaded from the "educational tags" database (created previously by the content designer module). In this way, the students will have in their iPad a complete guide about all heart sections over a physical model that they can manipulate.

At today, we have focussed our system on the heart but, generating the appropriate educational tags and 3D virtual model, the system can be used to teach every organ.

Keywords:

Augmented Reality, Mobile Learning, Medicine, Human Anatomy.