Augmented Reality (AR): The Future of "Patient Information Leaflets

At present, the traditional approach to patient education regarding diseases such as a new cancer diagnosis, is the patient information leaflet. Patient information leaflets often fail to convey the required medical information due to poor levels of literacy in the population, with 20% patients in the UK having the lowest level of adult literacy (equivalent to an individual who is unable to determine how much medicine to give a child from information printed on the package). "Health literacy" - the ability to obtain, understand, act on and communicate health information - is even lower, with estimates that 40% of patients have inadequate levels of health literacy. Additionally, there is a large knowledge gap between what doctors perceive patients understand about an illness, medication, or operation, and what patients actually comprehend and retain during consultation. The plethora of problems of inadequate information, poor health literacy and patient-doctor knowledge disconnect, may be addressed with an approach to patient information leaflets using a platform that is entirely simulative and visual, thereby overcoming the problem of health literacy. The study builds upon pilot work by this research team on patient leaflets using AR to aid in patient education, visualisation and retention of information (Lo et al 2019).