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Android AR / VR Digital Healthcare

Enlightening Patients with Augmented Reality

In a recent research project, we researched possibilities for interactive storytelling, usability, and interaction methods of an Augmented Reality app for patient education. We developed an ARCore app with Unity that helps patients with strabismus to better understand the processes of examinations and eye surgeries. Afterwards, we performed a 2-phase evaluation with a total of 24 test subjects.

We published the results at the IEEE VR conference. The peer-reviewed paper is available through the open access online proceedings or on ResearchGate.

A brief overview of the main findings:

Health Literacy and Education

Low health literacy is a well-known and serious issue. 1 in 5 American adults lack skills to fully understand implications of processes related to their health . Audio and computer-aided instructions can be helpful. Especially spoken instructions lead to a higher rate of understanding . A smartphone app that combines multiple approaches can therefore provide great benefits.

We developed and evaluated a prototype Augmented Reality (AR) mobile application called Enlightening Patients with Augmented Reality (EPAR). The app is designed for patient education about strabismus and the corresponding eye surgery. It is intended to be used in addition to the doctors’ mandatory consultations.

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Digital Healthcare Speech Assistants

Top New Alexa Skills by Students

In the “rapid prototyping” lecture of the degree program Digital Healthcare at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, students faced a unique task: after just a brief introduction to voice design and speech assistants, their assignment was to create and publish an Alexa skill or Google Assistant Action.

The topic was free to choose and up to the creativity of the students. Their creation had to pass the manual skill certification process performed by Amazon. This means that they didn’t have to just develop the skill, but also provide all required metadata like description and icons.

As a development tool for prototyping, we decided to use Voiceflow. It proved to be easy to use and extremely quick to achieve results already in our Alexa for Wellbeing Online Challenge.

Top Alexa Skills by the Students

In total, 14 skills have been developed and published by 14 students. Here, I’d like to highlight a few of the skills that I found especially interesting. Most of these are available in German only.

Cat Quiz

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Digital Healthcare Events Speech Assistants

Alexa for Wellbeing Online Challenge

In the near future, we will primarily interact with technology through voice. Especially for older generations and kids, voice has the lowest entry barrier – compared to the complexity of computers or even smartphones. Simply start talking to speech assistants like Amazon Alexa, and they will help immediately.

To make most use of it, I’ve co-organized the “Alexa for Wellbeing Online Challenge” during the last few weeks. Together with AWS Educate and Hilfswerk Lower Austria, we’ll host a 10-day online hackathon, open to everyone.

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Android App Development AR / VR Digital Healthcare

Hit Test & Augmented Reality Anchors with Amazon Sumerian (Part 3)

In an Augmented Reality scene, users looks at the live camera feed. Virtual objects anchor at specific positions of the real world. Our task is to let the user place virtual in the real world. To achieve that, the user simply taps on the smartphone screen. Through a hit test, our script then creates an anchor in the real world and links that to a virtual 3D model entity.

That’s the high level overview. To code this anchoring logic, a few intermediate steps are needed:

  1. Hit Test: converts coordinates of the user’s screen tap and sends the normalized coordinates to the AR system. This checks what’s in the real world at that position.
  2. Register Anchor: next, our script instructs the AR system to create an anchor at that position.
  3. Link Anchor: finally, the ID of the created anchor is linked to our entity. This allows Sumerian to continually update the transform of our 3D entity. Thus, the object stays in place in the real world, even when the user moves around.

Transforming these steps into code, this is what our code architecture looks like. It includes three call-backs, starting with the touch event and ending with the registered and linked AR anchor.

Categories
Android App Development AR / VR Digital Healthcare

Augmented Reality Anchors and Amazon Sumerian’s ArAnchorComponent (Part 2)

The WebXR standard isn’t finished yet. How does the web-based Amazon Sumerian platform integrate with the real world for Augmented Reality? We’ll take a look at the glue that binds the 3D WebGL contents from the web view to the native AR platform (ARCore / ARKit). To access this, we will also look at Sumerian internal engine classes like ArAnchorComponent, which handle the cross-platform web-to-native mapping.

This article continues from part 1, which covered the scripting basics of Amazon Sumerian and prepared the scene for AR placement.

Anchors in Amazon Sumerian

Let’s start with a bit of background of how Sumerian handles AR.

Ultimately, a 3D model is placed in the user’s real environment using an “Anchor”. This is directly represented in Sumerian. To create an anchor in your scene, your code goes through the following steps:

Categories
Android App Development AR / VR Digital Healthcare

Augmented Reality Object Placement with Amazon Sumerian (Part 1)

How to (re)-position the virtual objects in the real world in an Augmented Reality experience – while still having an interactive scene? Elegantly guide your users through the placement process.

The official AR tutorial from Amazon contains a simple script: by tapping anywhere in the scene, it instantly moves the objects to that position. However, for the Digital Healthcare Explained app, I needed a more flexible behavior:

  1. Activate placement mode by tapping on a specific object in the 3D scene. In this case, I decided that tapping the host avatar triggers placement mode.
  2. The host then explains what to do: tapping on another surface moves the host and related objects. Guide users through the process. The Sumerian hosts are ideal to explain the process.
  3. The user taps on a real-world surface in the AR scene.
  4. Next, the scene contents move, the anchor updates and the host confirms.

New ES6 Based Scripting

Additionally, Amazon Sumerian is evolving its scripting language. A major upgrade to ES6 is underway. It’s fully based on classes and fits better into the actions and state machines used in other places of Sumerian. The new APIs are still marked as “Preview”. However, the old APIs are already called “Legacy” or “Old Script Format”.

While documentation for the new Sumerian Engine APIs directly is already available, it’s very brief and doesn’t contain many examples. The official tutorials are still based on the legacy API.

I decided to re-write the script using the new APIs. It involves calling a lot of internal parts of Sumerian. Thus, it’s a lot more complex than all other examples for the new API currently out there. However, it’s interesting to dig more into the internals of how a modern, web-based AR environment works.

Categories
App Development AR / VR Digital Healthcare

Create engaging Healthcare Experiences with Augmented Reality

Download hands-on workshop slides and material for a complete getting-started guide to your first 3D experience – with a background in digital healthcare!

Conference Session

The build.well.being conference is an annual networking event for the doers in Digital Healthcare. The fast-paced event compresses a lot of useful information into a short day: sessions from health professionals (including a keynote from Brian Anthony, associate director at the MIT.nano). Student project pitches. Plus: hands-on workshops.

Amazon Sumerian Workshop @ build.well.being, © FH St. Pölten | Tobias Sautner
Amazon Sumerian Workshop @ build.well.being, © FH St. Pölten | Tobias Sautner

Together with Anna Runefelt, I was running a challenging workshop: introducing attendees with a healthcare background to the world of Augmented / Virtual Reality. The aim of the hands-on workshop: creating your first live 3D experience in about 1 hour. This was possible thanks to the easy-to-use interface of Amazon Sumerian. Most of the attendees who followed along indeed managed to get a fully working 3D scene running on their laptops.

Categories
Android App Development AR / VR Digital Healthcare

Download, Export or Backup Amazon Sumerian Scenes (Part 6)

Amazon Sumerian is a purely cloud-based tool. Its scenes are intended to be run directly from the cloud. As such, one of the most common questions is: how can I download the scene I created in Amazon Sumerian? You might want to do this to have a backup, to send it to a colleague or to move the scene to another region.

Snapshots

The easiest way to backup your scene is to create a snapshot. This is directly integrated into the main Sumerian editor UI. Select the root node of the scene in the Entities panel. Next, navigate to the “Snapshots” section in the inspector panel.

In this panel, you can create snapshots that are easy to return to later. I’d recommend creating a snapshot before major changes in your app, after finishing vital parts of code, and obviously for every publicly released version.

However, the snapshots are internal to the scene. How to get content from one scene to another?

Categories
Android App Development AR / VR Digital Healthcare

Animation & Timeline for AR with Amazon Sumerian (Part 5)

So far, we have set up a fully functional scene for our ambitious Augmented Reality project. The overall idea: a host avatar explains different 3D objects, which are placed in the user’s surroundings. Only one piece is missing – an animation.

In this part of the article series, we’ll look at three possible ways to animate objects in Amazon Sumerian: timelines, “classic” continuous animations and tween actions as part of state machines in behaviors. All three have different advantages and use cases. Thus, it’s important that you can decide which approach is best for each situation.

This is a capture of the current prototype and what it’ll look like, captured from a phone in Augmented Reality.

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Animations in the Digital Healthcare Explained prototype, captured in Augmented Reality running on a Google Pixel with ARCore

Animation Actions

Let’s get started with the tween actions. In the previous parts, we’ve already integrated several state machines and actions into our scene. This approach ties in perfectly well into the same approach.

Categories
Android App Development AR / VR Digital Healthcare

User Interaction & Messages in Amazon Sumerian (Part 4)

Learn how to let individual parts of your AR / VR app communicate with each other. This part of the tutorial lets the user trigger actions within your scene. For example: the host starts explaining an object when you tap on it. Internally, the connection is established via messages. It’s a vital concept to understand on your journey to real-life AR apps with Amazon Sumerian.

The guide builds upon the project created in the previous parts of the article: 1 – general setup, 2 – speech & gestures, 3 – 3D Models & AR Anchors.

App Scenario: “Digital Healthcare Explained”

After the basic components of the scene are in place, it’s time to wire everything together. We want to achieve two things:

  • Chain sequences together to make one thing happen after another
  • Let the user interact with entities in the scene

Our demo app informs the user about different healthcare topics. The following chart summarizes its flow:

Overall concept of the "Digital Healthcare Explained" app.
Overall concept of the “Digital Healthcare Explained” app.

At first, the host greets the user. Then, several 3D models representing different healthcare topics appear around the host. The user selects one of these topics by tapping the respective entity. As we’re creating an Augmented Reality app, the user can walk around in the room to discover different topics.

Once the user tapped on one of these topics, the host starts explaining. Specific animations for the selected object start, which help understanding the topic.

After the host finished the explanation, the user can select the next topic.

Messages: Communication within the Scene

Events are broadcasted through messages. These are simply user-defined strings. In Sumerian, they’re often referred to as “channels”.