Learning Human Anatomy Using ARA Mobile Application

Abstract

Smartphones with mobile applications have become part of everyday life, as they transformed the ways people manage their tasks. Many fields and sectors are using mobile applications to facilitate their services. Education is an important field that can utilize the various features of mobile applications to assist students and educators. Students are learning several subjects and concepts in schools, including biology. With traditional teaching methods, students may face difficulties in grasping knowledge about human anatomy. This can affect the teaching effectiveness, students’ learning process, their engagement in class, and their academic performance. To take full advantage of the technological tools available in the market and to improve teaching effectiveness in the biology field, this paper proposes an Augmented Reality Anatomy mobile application (ARA for short). With ARA, students can learn about human anatomy and organs using augmented reality technology. Among the interesting features of ARA are: visualizing human anatomy as 3D models, examining the different human organs, controlling their visibility, recognizing drawings of organs, learning about each organ structure, function, and how to keep it healthy, and taking pictures and sharing them using social media platforms. More importantly, the proposed application enables the visualization of human anatomy without resorting to the marker tracking method. To evaluate the usefulness and the usability of the proposed application, the latter has been tested with students at the Genius Kids Center in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Positive feedback has been received from students who have enjoyed learning and interacting with human anatomy.