An augmented reality app for therapeutic education and suitable for mobile devices with different features

Patients with chronic diseases can improve their quality of life with therapeutic education. Augmented Reality (AR) can be used to develop therapeutic tools. This paper presents a study in which an AR app to support therapeutic education in diabetes was used. The app supports the learning about carbohydrate portions contained in different foods. The virtual food is shown on a real dish. Sixty-six children with diabetes participated in our study. The children were divided into three groups that used three different mobile devices. The main differences between the three devices were camera resolution and display size. We used two tablets with similar display size and different camera resolution (2-megapixel and 8-megapixel), and a smartphone with about half of the diagonal display size of the tablets and with an 8-megapixel camera. The results indicated that the children learned about carbohydrate estimation by using our app. There were no statistically significant differences for the knowledge acquired, or for the perceived usability and satisfaction among the three groups. This result points out that our AR app is effective as a therapeutic education tool independently of the features of the device used.