Augmented Reality for Medical Training in Eastern Africa

Abstract

Access to qualified medical care is severely limited in low-resource areas within East Africa. Technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) have been shown to be useful for medical teaching and guidance and may contribute to the training of medical experts in these countries. While still expensive, AR has low infrastructure requirements like cell phones, where ownership has constantly increased over the last few years. However, AR is mainly tested for training and surgical applications in highly developed environments. In this study, we tested whether AR can also address the needs for healthcare and medical education in East Africa. Our study consisted of a medical need-finding part and a pilot study to address some of these needs with AR. Our study shows that remote teaching via AR led to significantly higher test score gains and more consistent results than in the in-person control group.