Professional Differences in Use and Perceptions of an Augmented Reality Code Cart Application

Medication and equipment must be located and retrieved quickly during resuscitation to ensure good patient outcomes; code carts are often used to store commonly used items and may be standardized to support faster retrieval. An augmented reality (AR) application to teach clinicians about the contents and organization of a standardized pediatric code cart was developed for mobile devices to improve the speed and accuracy of retrieval of items from the code cart. In this study, we explore the use, usability, and satisfaction of users of that application. We conducted surveys (n = 56) with physicians, physicians in training, nurses and nurse educators who used the application. The surveys collected self-reported use, usability with the System Usability Scale (SUS) and satisfaction. We compared results from different clinical roles. The application had acceptable usability (average SUS score = 75.9) and average satisfaction of 74.9 on a scale from 0 to 100 reported after an average of nearly 3 h of application use, with no significant differences between clinical roles. While the application was acceptable, improving the interface design, features and function of the application could enhance the experience of users. Future work could include participants from other health care systems to gain a more generalizable understanding of user experience and compare the experience of users of the AR application with their experiences with other training methods.