JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive technology that uses persuasive digital data and real-world surroundings to expand the user's reality, where objects are produced by various computer applications. It constitutes a novel advancement in medical care, education and training.

Objective:

The aim of this work was to assess how effective AR is in training medical students compared to other educational methods in terms of skills, knowledge, confidence, performance time and satisfaction.

Methods:

We performed a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of AR in medical training, that was constructed by the Cochrane methodology. An online literature search was performed using the Cochrane Library, Web of Science, PubMed, and Embase to find studies that recorded the effect of AR in medical training up to April 2021. The quality of the selected studies was assessed by following the criteria of Cochrane for “risk-of-bias evaluation”.

Results:

Thirteen studies, with a total of 654 participants, were included in the meta-analysis. The findings showed that using AR in training can improve participants' performance time (I2=99.9%, P=0), confidence (I2=97.7%, P=0.018) and satisfaction (I2=99.8%, P=0.006) more than what occurs under control conditions. Meanwhile AR did not have any effect on the participants’ knowledge (I2=99.4%, P=0.897) and skill (I2=97.5%, P=0.095). The meta regression plot shows that there has been an increase in the number of articles discussing AR over the years and that there is no publication bias in the studies used for the meta-analysis.

Conclusions:

The findings of this work suggest that AR can effectively advance the performance time, satisfaction and confidence in the medical training, but not very effective in areas such as knowledge and skill. Therefore, more AR should be implemented in the field of medical training and education. However, to confirm these findings, more meticulous research with a larger participant is needed.