Development and evaluation of a 3D mobile application for learning manual therapy in the physiotherapy laboratory

摘要

Teaching manual therapy is one of the most relevant issues in a physiotherapy course. However, knowledge of anatomy is considered fundamental for an effective instruction of this topic. Students should be able to refresh this knowledge while practicing manipulative techniques in the teaching laboratory in an efficient way. In this paper, we present a novel anatomy learning application for mobile devices and describe the successful embedding of such tool into a practical manual therapy course in a laboratory. This application provides students with interactive 3D visualizations of medical imaging on easy-to-carry hand-held devices. We also report two evaluations of this tool. The first one was conducted to evaluate the students' and professors' grade of satisfaction when using our tool. The second one was carried out to determine whether the tool has better learning outcomes than standard methods of teaching anatomy. Students and professors rated the proposed m-learning tool very positively. We also found significant relevance in learning outcomes through the use of this tool. We can conclude that the developed application could be a useful tool for studying manual therapy, and that it could be integrated into the existing physiotherapy curricula.