Abstract:

In this paper, we discuss the creation of a prototype of an educational app to train psychomotor skills perpetual to manual medicine, i.e., to palpation and treatment of so-called trigger points. We will discuss and present several design loops, discuss the educational, technical, and design requirements and tradeoffs, and advocate towards the use of user-centered design, especially for learning.

The work reported in this paper is carried out as a part of the project named SmartHands (funded by Federal Ministry of Education and Research BMBF under project number 01PG20006), in which we try to integrate innovative media (such as AR; VR, haptic devices) into the medical domain. As the project is still in the starting phase, we will focus on identifying the state of the art and white spots regarding the use of digital realities for that type of learning, literature analysis of similar projects, discussion of the requirements (technical, educational, usability) and process of the design.

Conventionally, psychomotor skills are taught in a classical lecture and then practice in lab-based sessions. It is also a common practice, especially to the first-year medical students, to start practicing on the available learning objects: their peers. The presented use-case is the use of the application to augment a real-world scenario of dyad-learning. A student and their peer are collocated, they use a HoloLens headset with the running application to have an overview of the procedural knowledge and to project the learning material directly onto the body of the partner, to practice the skills, and then, if necessary, switch. The HoloLens application though enables the student to learn whenever and whoever possible, potentially also with a virtual avatar and haptic gloves which make it possible to interact with the virtual objects in a manner closest to the natural. This approach makes it possible to the students, especially novel ones, to train the skills and collect the practical experience on the various models/bodies/volunteers. Mixed reality (MR) is the advance in technology, stepping a bit further from video and other traditional resources, as it is possible to go to mastering the skills and adapt them into various conditions, and not only abstract or generalizable model, directly during the process and using the information embedded into directly into the learning experience.

The outcome of this project should serve as a framework to validate the use of MR for learning psychomotor skills. We will contribute to the existing knowledge by discussing the lessons learned and guidelines for the multidisciplinary design of educational applications, summarize evidence from the scientific literature, and outline the directions for future work.

Keywords:

Manual Medicine, Mixed Reality, HoloLens, User-Centered Design.