Abstract
Purpose :
Augmented reality (AR) technologies provide immersive first-person experience for us to experience how patients live with diseases. This allows the public to better understand the subject diseases and walk in the patients’ shoes. However, the use of such technologies is still limited in health promotion on the visual symptoms of eye diseases. We hypothesize that the use of AR-based learning activities in health promotion can achieve a large effect on knowledge acquisition to the elderly people.
Methods :
The study made use of the in-house developed AR mobile application that simulates the visual symptoms of various eye diseases to develop a health promotion workshop. In this workshop, elderly people (age >= 60) without self-reported visual impairment learnt about the visual symptoms of eye diseases including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and cataract, through completing tasks that simulated daily living with the AR-simulated impaired vision. The participants’ knowledge of the visual symptoms of eye diseases were tested before and after the workshop.
Results :
A total of 377 participants from 10 local daily elderly centers without receiving any education relevant to visual symptoms of eye diseases participated in the study. The subjects had a significant gain in knowledge in all the 4 types of eye diseases after attending the AR-based workshop (Cohen’s ds > 0.8, Ps < 0.05). Some participants reflected that they had a better understanding of what visually impaired people suffer from in daily living, and with a higher level of empathy after attending the workshop.
Conclusions :
The AR-based health promotion workshop is effective in teaching elderly people the knowledge about the visual symptoms of eye diseases, and at the same time has positive influence on their empathy to the visually impaired people. This study serves as a good example of how AR technologies can be implemented in health promotion to achieve effective teaching and improve the empathy of the public to patients.
This abstract was presented at the 2024 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, WA, May 5-9, 2024.