The impacts of augmented reality teaching tools in health professional education.

Objective: Augmented reality (AR) has successfully facilitated clinical training in health professional education. This technology can also accelerate non-clinical classroom education by improving students' spatial understanding and mental rotation skills, essential for many health professional education programs, including dental hygiene. However, this use has been relatively less explored and evaluated. This review investigates the effectiveness of AR-based tools in non-clinical didactic teaching. Methods: A literature search was conducted in 3 databases using the search terms "augmented reality," "classroom teaching," and "health professional education." Articles were screened first by the title and then by full-text review to identify reports that met the inclusion criteria and were relevant to the research questions. Results: Nineteen articles were included in the narrative review. AR Magic Mirror and ARBOOK were found to be the 2 most-used AR tools in didactic teaching. AR-based teaching tools can reduce cognitive loads and improve knowledge acquisition, spatial understanding, mental rotation skills, attention, motivation, confidence, and satisfaction. Discussion: AR tools can significantly improve students' learning experiences compared to traditional teaching methods in health professional education. As most AR-based teaching tools are focused on teaching anatomy, many health professional education programs can benefit from these tools. However, qualitative exploration of student and faculty perspectives and development costs are absent from the literature. Conclusion: Didactic learning of basic science concepts such as anatomy is essential to many health professional education programs, including dental hygiene. Dental hygiene can largely benefit from incorporating AR-based teaching tools into classroom education.