HEART MOBILE LEARNING

Abstract

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, we will introduce HeARt, an augmented reality mobile Learning system to support university medical students in their learning activities during an anatomy laboratory. 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 about 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 contents visually connected to the physical organ, giving the opportunity to manipulate the physical human heart model or, with some adaptation, to a real organ.