Florina Fiador
AR Tablet Application
'Explaining Arthritis' was designed as a public engagement tool for Rheumatosphere as part of my dissertation project. Rheumatosphere is a public awareness team under the University of Glasgow, which focuses on raising awareness about Rheumatoid Arthritis.
The team wanted an engaging application to educate the general public on the differences between Rheumatoid Arthritis and Osteoarthritis. The application had to appeal to members of the public 16 and over and from version literacy backgrounds.
Storyboarding & Focus Groups
Low fidelity storyboards were drawn to sketch out what each scene would contain and to gather the general idea of the userability functions.
The storyboard and ideas were presented to the public engagement team (Rheumatosphere) which gave their input for recommended changes.
A new storyboard was developed to reflect the changes and a prototype created in unity.
This prototype was presented to a focus group of 5 rheumatology patients and the Rheumatosphere team for further feedback. The prototype was edited to reflect this.
Overview
Design
The main colour scheme was taken from the Rheumatosphere logo, which contains rainbow colours.
The green, blue and purple were focused on to highlight the three main joint types.
Most signs and typography were handwritten to give a more welcoming approach for the public.
The design process followed the flow illustrated on the left.
In between each stage, models, illustrations and all information were checked for factual accuracy.
UI and app development were carried out in Unity. The app consisted of 4 main scenes - Home page, AR, 3D Models and animation.
The AR poster and UI sprites were created in Photoshop and Illustrator.
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Please slide through the images on the left to view the design process and final scenes.
User Testing
In terms of userability testing the System Usability Scale (SUS) system questionnaire produced by John Brooke (1996) was used.
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11 participants (4 males, 7 Females) volunteered to participate in the testing of the application. They were all over the age of 16 and random members of the public. Testing was carried out at the Glasgow Science Centre.
A T-test was performed to assess the effectiveness of the application from the pre-test and post-test questionnaire outcomes.
Although the sample size was relatively too small to generalise concrete conclusions, overall the application has shown to be user-friendly, and to effectively support learning. This seemed to be the case regardless of the participant’s technology and medical literacy.
More information on the studies taken and results can be found in the publish thesis - Fiador, F., Poyade, M. and Bennett, L. (2020) The use of augmented reality to raise awareness of the differences between osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. In: Rea, P. M. (ed.) Biomedical Visualisation [Volume 7]. Series: Advances in experimental medicine and biology (1262). Springer: Cham, Switzerland, pp. 115-147. ISBN 9783030439606 (doi:10.1007/978-3-030-43961-3_6)
Programs used
Unity
3ds Max
Adobe
Creative Suite
